The madness of the mortgage market

A torturing of the English language preceded the crash in the US mortgage market. Finances houses offered 'sub-prime' mortgages to anyone who wanted them. 'Sub-prime', like 'sub-optimal', is a euphemism for 'terrible'. The mortgage sales teams didn't mean that their products were terrible, although often they were, but that the borrowers weren't of prime quality - terribly risky, in short. They were poor serial debtors or once comfortable people who had become too old to realise that they were signing away valuable assets when they remortgaged their homes. Read more