Case Study

In the 1970s banks began selling mortgages to public and private mortgage funds that sell shares to investors. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, many mortgages to “subprime” borrowers with low credit ratings and modest income were approved because banks and mortgage brokers made money by making loans and then selling them, and didn’t care if borrowers defaulted. Matters were complicated by financial engineering and compliant rating agencies. The Great Recession resulted from many people falling into several of the pitfalls of data science. They fooled themselves, they worshipped mathematics, they used bad data, they tortured data, and they did harm.