Greediness of Mortgage Lenders

(1) Mortgage loans are a substantial form of revenue for the financial industry. Mortgage loans generate billions of dollars in the financial industry. It is no secret that companies have the ability to make a lot of money by offering a variety of mortgage loan products. The problem was not mortgage loans but that mortgage companies were using unethical behavior to get consumer mortgage loans approved. Unfortunately, the Countrywide Financial case was not an isolated case. Many top name mortgage companies have been guilty of unethical behavior. Just as the American housing market was starting to recover from its worst battering since the Great Depression, a new scandal, an epidemic of flawed or fraudulent mortgage documents, threatens to send not just the housing market but the entire economy back into a tailspin (Nation, 2010). Countrywide Financial got greedy and started to make questionable and unethical decisions to make money. Countrywide Financial preyed on consumers that could not qualify for conventional loans and those that could to make more money with subprime loans. Countrywide was found guilty of mortgage fraud. The U.S. government is seeking to have Bank of America Corp. pay nearly $864 million in damages after the company was found liable for mortgage fraud (Subramanian, 2013). (2) Subprime loans are ethical but misused in a way that created ethical issues. Subprime loans are loans made to borrowers, generally people who would not qualify for traditional loans, at a rate higher than the prime rate depending on factors like credit score, down payment, debt-to-income ratio, and payment delinquencies (Ferrell, O., Fraedrich, & Ferrell, L., 2010). Subprime loans help consumers get mortgage loans that do not qualify for a conventional mortgage loan product. It is normal practice for financial companies to charge consumers with credit history issues higher interest rates. It is justifiable because consumers with credit history issues that have had problems paying other creditors back in the past are more of a credit risk. Mortgage subprime loans are no different. Subprime loans become an ethical issue when financial companies use unethical practices to make subprime loans just in order to make more money. (3) The downfall of Countrywide Financial was a result of the company’s unethical practices. Countrywide wanted to make home loans available for consumers that otherwise would not qualify for a traditional home loan product. Subprime loans are priced higher due to the risk of the borrower.