If a borrower is truly qualified than the education or lack there of is less of an issue. If the borrower “should” be educated,the point of establishing whether he or she is or is not RE Finance literate, is going to be the person qualifying them. That person and the underwriter should also decide if the customer is a idiot flipper or what have you. These parties do this to protect the lender and so that most loans survived to “season”. It was pretty bad for a loan to fail. Fixed teaser rates probably removed the fear of a loan not seasoning. Borrowers were no more educated when things worked. Originators acted more responsibly because they had to.

That said I don’t blame the originators too much. I do like to blame them because if they practiced the golden rule I don’t think they would have written so much garbage and told so many lies in the process. I know a few who quit or just did loans to good candidates. Most people, including most of us wouldn’t do that and if we did someone else would be put in to push the paper.

In my opinion the source to blame is the Pols/FED/Banks and Wall Street, NAR, BUILDERS…any institution big enough for their complicity to be substantive in maintaining the ridiculous bubble forming pattern. Clearly the public is in a child like state as compared to these parties. To me the parents are selfish,abusive and evasive, but what can we do about it? Nothing so we might as well linger in some nebulous blame game which includes the most ridiculous candidates. That’s our place. Now go “get and spend”.

Yes the FB’s & GF’s are uneducated, , maybe greedy regarding RE, but they did not cause this. As far as I am concerned, all they did is enroll in the school of hard knocks. It is going to be easier to blame them as the get breaks from the “Parents” but that is pedantic too. Obviously, all those parties are trying to help themselves and the borrowers are sometimes lucky beneficiaries.