mortgage fraud and foreclosure WSJ article

Is the Wall Street Journal trying to save jobs at a greedy, stupid mortgage companies? In the wall street journal article Friday Dec 21 "Fraud is seen as Driver in Wave of Mortgage Foreclosures" your reporters show a scheme where anyone with good credit can get a loan for any amount of money. Fraud was committed but it did not cause the problem - one need only look at the loan officers. First any competent loan officer will look at a credit report- it is more than a score. The credit report will tell the applicant's job as well as his high credit limits, length of credit etc. I have seen 700+ credit scores with a single credit card paid as agreed with a maximum credit amount of $2,500. This shallow 700 credit score would not qualify for a $40,000 car loan let alone qualify for a $1.8 million mortgage. Furthermore the credit report would show the applicant's occupation as a telephone technician. Anyone of competency would wonder how he transformed himself into a $50,000/month top officer of a marketing firm. There are also products on the net that show actual housing values in neighborhoods. One would wonder why anyone would write a loan for a property to return large sums of money back to the borrowers. Might this raise some red flags. Rather it was greed that prevented these officers from carrying out their fiduciary responsibility. It allowed the loan officers and the banks to grab their share of the market and make their hefty commissions. To make it seem like these banks were duped is to make us readers look as stupid as they were greedy.