Mom, you too?

Today during class as we listened to the "Giant Pool of Money" from NPR, and I could finally understand exactly what my mom was doing for a living. As a mortgage broker, she was giving loans to anybody who needed one. Before today, I had no clue what being a mortgage broker intailed other than loaning money to people, but I would have never guessed that anybody, yes, anybody could get a loan. How could you just loan somebody thousands of dollars without knowing anything about their background? It just makes no sense. But when it's not even your money that you're lending out, does it really matter to you who it's going to? I guess not. So all that time, my mom was making money off these loans, good and bad ones, just like all of the other mortgage brokers. So who is to blame for the economic downfall? Is the entire system just too messed up to fix? Once you've become so overwhelmed in debts from the loans you get, how do you get out of debt if you don't have the money?