Here we go again? Wall Street buying risky mortgages

Reading the financial pages these days, it’s hard to figure out if we’re supposed to be still agonizing over the last mortgage crisis or wringing hands about the chances for the next one.

The New York Times today highlights a little trend among big investors to buy up pools of delinquent, bubble-vintage mortgages. These are loans on properties about enter foreclosure, and the folks buying them are basically doing salvage work, grabbing somewhat higher yields while betting on recovering some percentage of face value.

Then there’s a Reuters piece on the revival of a kind of low-documentation “stated-income” loan – mortgages extended by subprime lenders to borrowers who can’t provide paperwork like pay stubs or tax returns.

Both stories are infused with the tone of “Can you believe it?” and “Here we go again” and “Will we ever learn?” But this coverage says a bit more about how we in the media remain anchored in the old bubble-and-bust storyline than it does about genuine threats to financial health now.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/here-we-go-again--wall-street-buying-risking-mortgages-132536117.html