Ten Years After:The Secret History of the 2000s, And The Minority Mortgage Meltdown

Here's a beautiful brochure from ten years ago that is Exhibit A in the Secret History of the 2000s:

The American Dream of Homeownership: From Cliché to Mission [1]
Presentation by Angelo R. Mozilo

Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer,

Countrywide Financial Corporation & Chairman, Countrywide Home Loans, Inc.

The Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University

John T. Dunlop Lecture

Sponsored by The National Housing Endowment

Washington, DC February 4, 2003

And here's another document of that era, from the New York Stock Exchange magazine, May 2005:

American Dream Builder: CEO Angelo Mozilo targets U.S. “multicultural market communities” as core Countrywide customers. [2]

When I call this kind of thing the "Secret History of the 2000s," I don't mean that Mozilo's Harvard address or Bush's mortgage speeches were given in a secure location dug out deep under the Greenbrier Country Club [3]. No, they were heavily publicized to all interested parties. But they might as well be secret today because they don't fit into any of the standard, respectable models of "Who Are the Good Guys and Who Are the Bad Guys?" There's no pre-existing team to push this analysis of What Just Happened, so it might as well be secret.