Mark Carroll's Journal

There's no risk in that for them as long as the housing bubble continues - or at any rate flattens rather than bursting, etc. As I understand it the crash was caused by partly-unsecured loans.

An extreme example of this is "logbook loans"; CEB and I talked some years ago to a nice charming loanshark [1] at B-Movie who explained, simply enough, that they expect to take possession of the victim's motor car; there's no real assessment of their ability to pay at all.

[1] This made for conflicting feelings.