Hindsight or Foresight

I started reading an article today on CNNMoney about the mortgage securities market. The article is interesting enough warning us that big banks are attempting to exempt themselves from the 'skin-in-the-game' rule introduced by Dodd-Frank financial reform. Leaving the aforementioned thought out there, the article mentioned NINJA loans. NINJA loans were our NO-INCOME, NO-ASSETS, NO-PROBLEM loans. Those words really took me down memory lane where hindsight should have been foresight. I worked for Wells Fargo and Countrywide during those times, both very large institutions employing many intelligent Americans. What were we thinking? No Income: By not verifying income, we allowed borrowers to decide for themselves whether they could pay the mortgage. We trusted them as they trusted us, along with stories of manufactured income amounts, to pay the mortgage monthly. Borrowers may have thought, as they do when they are over-leveraged on credit card debt, that they would figure it all out later. Would borrowers get a boarder, or have their parents contribute, or count on their incomes to increase, or their other debts to decrease? Who knew, who cared...................however, we all should have known. No Assets: To compound the issue of No Income, lenders added an additional perk of No Assets. Really? So here we said, don't prove what you earn and don't prove that you have the ability to pay if something goes wrong, like loosing your job. It didn't matter that someone made $25,000.00 a month and only had $500 in their asset accounts, approved. Looking back at that one lending program, how could our community of regulators, company presidents, banking oversight committees, brokers, bankers, and customers not think that this would lead to disaster or at the very least, abuse. I know that we have a bad track record of repeating our past mistakes as individuals and as a country. I hope that this is one mistake that we do not repeat.