[andybak]

While I'm not going to suggest anything conspiratorial, when I first thought about the 'easy mortagages' trend and the fact that the property itself was the collateral, the perverse incentives involved seemed so obvious that I assumed there must be a large mitigating factor I wasn't aware of.

One thing I don't fully understand, why don't the lenders themselves auction of the properties rather than keeping and profiting off the foreclosed properties themselves?