The enablers of the mortgage meltdown

This is it, right here.

“If a loan came from a top loan officer, they didn’t care what the situation was, you had to make that loan work,” she says. “You were like a bad person if you declined a loan.”

One loan file was filled with so many discrepancies that she felt certain it involved mortgage fraud. She turned the loan down, she says, only to be scolded by her supervisor.

“She told me, ‘This broker has closed over $1 million with us and there is no reason you cannot make this loan work,’ ” Ms. Cooper says. “I explained to her the loan was not good at all, but she said I had to sign it.”

The argument did not end there, however. Ms. Cooper says her immediate boss complained to the team manager about the loan rejection and asked that Ms. Cooper be “written up,” with a formal letter of complaint placed in her personnel file.

Ms. Cooper said the team manager told her to “restructure” the loan to make it work. “I said, how can you restructure fraud? This is a fraudulent loan,” she recalls.

Ms. Cooper says that her bosses placed her on probation for 30 days for refusing to approve the loan and that her team manager signed off on the loan.

Four months later, the loan was in default, she says. The borrower had not made a single payment. “They tried to hang it on me,” Ms. Cooper said, “but I said, ‘No, I put in the system that I am not approving this loan.’ ”

As I said in my original post on the topic, a loan officer's job used to be vetting loans so the bank wouldn't lose money to defaults. Once the banks started selling off loans, that didn't matter.