Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Here are the latest numbers for the big AI companies:

As the collapse of the housing bubble approached, the financing got ever crazier. In 2005, interest-only loans accounted for 23 percent of all mortgages, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. An interest-only loan may not sound like a good way for people to accumulate equity, but whatever. It gets better.

Subprime loans got all the attention, but they may not have been the biggest tell that things in the mortgage market were out of whack. The category of mortgages known as Alt-A rose to 11 percent of the mortgages issued in 2005. Alt-A are mortgages given to people who ostensibly could qualify for prime mortgages but are unable to provide complete documentation. Typically, Alt-A accounts for 2-3 percent of mortgages.

The standard story is that they mostly go to small business owners. The generous interpretation is that they can’t fully document the income needed for a prime mortgage because their income fluctuates. The less generous interpretation is that they lie on their taxes so they can’t produce tax returns showing the income they claim.

Regardless of the interpretation, the number of people who fell into this category exploded in the housing bubble years. We can either believe that we had a lot more people with erratic income streams, or we........

© CounterPunch