In a strictly financial sense, it’s true. There simply are not that many good borrowers out there getting missed by the system. Some, but not anything like enough, because the lending banks are neither idle nor stupid at the pointy end unless you specifically instruct them to be, which is where politics comes into it. The market for CDOs was hot, and everyone wanted more of them, not least the government, which was presiding over a boom in confidence and property prices and thereby being made to look like a hero. Dutiful and delighted, the banks got back out there and created some more, riskier collections of debt and finally some which were frankly toxic and they were getting these rated as the same thing as the first lot, which is a miracle I’m not going to look too closely at in case it turns me to stone. So now they were creating bank loans which were unrepayable, which were actually structured so that they were never going to be repaid. You want to borrow half a million dollars against your shitty backlot and build a house you can’t afford, and you want to never make any payments and just owe the full amount plus interest—a sum total which is more than your ugly mosquito-infested pit will ever be worth—in forty years, by which time you will almost certainly be dead? We can accommodate that. Because the money wasn’t in the repayments any more, the money was in selling on the risk. It wasn’t important, in the first instance, whether the loan was good. It was only important that someone wanted to buy it, and they did.