The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America - and Spawned a Global Crisis
Lie, swindle, steal. It's another day at work for the sales professionals of the mortgage industry. Amid the wreckage of the S&L scandal, a group of maverick entrepreneurs hatch a new money-making scheme: writing 'subprime' loans at exorbitant prices and bundling them into securities for eager Wall Street banks. In this stunning narrative, award-winning reporter Michael W. Hudson brings us inside the boiler rooms and banks that flooded the nation with high-risk, high-profit mortgages. At Ameriquest Mortgage, the nation's largest subprime lender, salesmen sniff out homeowners vulnerable to refinancing pitches, and use Wite-Out to doctor documents. At rival FAMCO, employees memorize 'The Monster', a high-pressure sales tactic crafted to obscure interest rates - and so unscrupulous that one loan officer calls his state attorney general. With support from Washington bureaucrats and Wall Street, subprime grows into a $1.5 trillion behemoth - devastating the lives of millions of homeowners and wounding the U.S. economy. Provocative and gripping, The Monster, is a searing tale of a sales culture gone out of control and the bottom-feeding fraud and topdown greed that fuelled the financial collapse.
