Wait are you saying everyone was faking tax returns and employer paycheck stubs to get approved? Do you have any links for that? From what I understand they weren’t doing their due diligence in verifying income & with balloon loans the initial payment is lower and thus people who normally couldn’t qualify were getting approved
Yes, the banks and consumers were committing outright fraud. Back then there would be 100’s of craigslist post selling fake paychecks and W-2’s, in every city.
It was widespread and those businesses targeted low income borrowers to produce the fake documents. banks did know what was up, and some may have even shown people how to do it. But consumers were complicit in the fraud as well.
How Mortgage Fraud Made the Financial Crisis Worse
https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/do-no-income-verification-mortgages-still-exist/
What happened to no-doc mortgages?
The problem with no-doc mortgages started around the time the housing bubble of the early 2000s was taking shape. While these mortgages were originally intended for borrowers with fluctuating incomes and good credit, many subprime lenders moved beyond prime borrowers with good credit and incomes to subprime borrowers and other borrowers with less than perfect credit or shaky income qualifications.
As with many things, no-doc mortgages started out as a specialized product but the product soon expanded and they started offering no-doc mortgages to such an extent that they ended up calling them “liar loans.”
Liar loans – a term used to describe home loans where the applicant would
have to lie to qualify – became common in expensive markets where many people couldn’t get a mortgage for their preferred home if they presented an accurate picture of their finances. These loans defaulted in extraordinarily high percentages back then since borrowers couldn’t really afford them to begin with.
But, some lenders still kept making them. According to the
Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, which was the final report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States, low- and no-doc loans started going off in an entirely different direction around 2005. Realizing they could sell more loans if they loosened requirements, non-prime lenders started boasting how they could offer borrowers home loans without loads of paperwork in exchange for a higher interest rate.
From 2000 to 2007, no-doc loans more than quadrupled from around 2% of home loans to approximately 9% of all outstanding loans, according to the report.
While it may seem strange that banks would hand out loans to people who couldn’t afford them, lenders were incentivized to keep making these loans for a few reasons. First, loan officers still earned a commission regardless of whether the homebuyer defaulted on their loan or not. Second, mortgage lenders weren’t planning on keeping these loans on their books; instead they were repackaging these loans and selling them as mortgage-backed securities to investors.
Lenders made money on the origination of the loan, so they were trying to profit off of volume alone. It didn’t matter to them if the loan was good or bad as long as it went through.
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report noted that, by the time the financial crisis of 2008 hit, investors held more than $2 trillion of non-GSE (not from a government-sponsored enterprise) mortgage-backed securities and close to $700 billion of CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) that held mortgage-backed securities.
At the same time, delinquencies on mortgages started to surge nationwide, but particularly in “sand states” including Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada. Serious delinquencies — or delinquencies where mortgage payments are more than 90 days late —peaked at 13.6% of mortgages in sand states and at 8.7% of all mortgages nationwide in 2009.