If you could fog a mirror and had decent credit you could qualify for anything you wanted. I always warned borrowers that I could qualify them for more than they could afford and that it wasn't me that would have to make the payments. Now these were people with good credit. Most people don't get good credit on accident. They make rational decisions and pay their bills. The exception here is the person who always paid their bills but did a 80/20 loan and then got laid off or had medical issues etc. I thought (and still do) that the nothing down loan was stupid no matter who was taking it. It costs about 10% to sell a house so you are 10% in the hole from day 1.

I doubt most mortgage guys were that honest with their borrowers. I had it pretty easy though as I didn't do subprime loans. That was a choice I made. I didn't choose not to do them because I thought it was going to result in forclosures though. I didn't do them because they took about 4 times as long to put together and they often fell apart during the transaction. Sticking with A paper was easier.