$35,000/year salary and a $290,000 mortgage

This story pretty much sums up the root cause of the mortgage crisis.

• "Cortez makes $35,000 a year and has a poor credit history. Oliver Marquez, a financial counselor at the nonprofit Resurrection Project who advised Cortez, said the original $290,000 mortgage was well beyond his means."
• "More recently, some lenders have offered Alt-A loans to people who lacked sufficient documentation to get a traditional loan"

Another story from Bloomberg:

• "McLean, Virginia-based Freddie, which reported an $821 million quarterly loss two days ago, said that Alt-A mortgages were the biggest reason for a surge in its foreclosure losses. The delinquency rate for the $190 billion of the loans owned by Freddie or underlying the bonds the company guarantees jumped to 3.7 percent on June 30, from 1.8 percent on Dec. 31"
• "For minorities and immigrants, the ownership rate is less than 50 percent and that's what we're focusing a lot on and I think that that's where a lot of the growth in the market will be,'' Freddie Chief Executive Officer Richard Syron said in a interview with Bloomberg Television in 2004."