No One Was Safe from the Mortgage Crisis

• May 19th 2009

by Mark Wellborn

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Perhaps one of the last people that you would expect to fall victim to the sub-prime mortgage crisis would be a journalist that warned it was coming.

In 2004, NY Times business reporter Edmund Andrews bought a home in Silver Spring that he couldn’t afford and waded neck-deep into sub-prime mortgage hell. Two years later, he had a mountain of credit card debt and his relationship with his fiancée was falling apart.

Andrews (now seven months behind on his mortgage payments) wrote about his experience in a recent NY Times magazine piece, and the article reveals that the mortgage crisis affected even the most informed of people.

From the article:

“If there was anybody who should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe, it was I. As an economics reporter for The New York Times, I have been the paper’s chief eyes and ears on the Federal Reserve for the past six years. I watched Alan Greenspan and his successor, Ben S. Bernanke, at close range. I wrote several early-warning articles in 2004 about the spike in go-go mortgages. Before that, I had a hand in covering the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the Russia meltdown in 1998 and the dot-com collapse in 2000. I know a lot about the curveballs that the economy can throw at us.”

The full article can be read here. It is long, but well worth the time.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/no_one_was_safe_from_the_mortgage_crisis/928.