[tptacek]

Did people think "sub prime mortgages" existed solely to inflate bank revenue numbers?

Yes. Read _All The Devils Are Here_ for an excellent exposition about how the subprime market was first invented as a vehicle to get private banks out from under the thumb of Fannie Mae, then turned into a vehicle for boiler room speculation, and then fed back to Fannie Mae. The interests of homeowners were not a primary feature of the development of the subprime market; in fact, one open secret of the phenomenon was how few of those loans actually went to first mortgages on owner-occupied sole residences.