Interesting story from Sunday's Miami Herald that documents the thousands of criminals who flocked to the mortgage business, in many cases continuing their fraudulent lifestyle by duping banks. They exploited a Florida loophole that doesn't require mortgage broker licenses for so-called "loan originators":

A review of thousands of pages of court documents, state industry reports, internal e-mails and police reports shows that from 2000 to 2007, 5,306 people with criminal histories became loan originators -- a rate of nearly two a day. Worse, those include 2,201 who had committed financial crimes, such as fraud, money laundering and grand theft.

The more you read, the more you realized that much of our current housing problem stems from a grotesquely lax credit system allowing fraud to proliferate. Keep in mind that even if these loan originators gamed the system, they all worked under supervision of a licensed mortgage brokers. Where was the oversight?