Economists Do It With Models

Matt Taibbi:

So how did Hubbard manage to analyze Countrywide and conclude that mass fraud in its underwriting procedures wasn’t problematic? Easy: He didn’t look at the underwriting! All Hubbard did was take a group of Countrywide loans and compare them to a group of other loans from the same time period. When that comparison revealed that Countrywide’s loans failed at about the same rate as the non-Countrywide loans, he smartly concluded that fraud wasn’t the problem and that macroeconomic factors must have been the cause. Except for one thing: He left out the fact that about half of the loans in the “non-Countrywide” pool he selected for his analysis were originated by companies that were also being sued for underwriting fraud and other irregularities. What Hubbard did is compare a bunch of bad loans to a bunch of bad loans.

Come on, even I can do better than that, and I’ll even offer up a rate of $1,199 an hour to undercut Hubbard.