My Public Apology
So this is my public apology to the world for my part in the financial mess. You see, I used to run a mortgage lead generation company, generating internet and telemarketing leads for financial companies. In fact, we almost acquired a bank and started banking our own loans. (thankfully we didn’t). If you look at where a lot of these subprime loans came from - a lot of them came from lead generation done over the internet and through telemarketing, which is where I played. We built a big company up happily fueling the mortgage frenzy. I was proud of it once. I was twice called the “Father of Mortgage Lead Generation in India” for bringing to the call centers over there so much outbound telemarketing business and for building training programs that got copied (stolen) throughout the land. (The first lead deal I ever did, we gave 5 leads to a mortgage broker in WA state and they closed a loan and made $6,000 on it - those leads had cost only $75 to generate)
I remember when we were looking into acquiring a bank, I read a pile of books on Mortgage Backed Securities (Yes, I used to read arcane finance books for fun) and taking a course at NYU on MBS. And you know what, hard as I tried, I couldn’t understand the math. The Spreads between MBS and Treasuries were too small to account for defaults. I didn’t understand the business and we ended up not buying the bank but it was a very interesting experience. And I apologize for anyone whose ended up into a bad loan because of my leads.
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