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Comment by tw1010 | Hacker News Reader

Please please could someone recommend two or three books to get a more in-depth understanding of the history of mortgages, similar to what this (awesome!) video only briefly touched on.

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I can definitely recommend this list of posts by Tanta, who worked in the mortgage industry for years:

https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2008/12/compendium-of-tan...

I looked at turning these into an ebook (with permission from the family) but never got it published.

I would love you if you sent me that ebook (email in bio).

Thanks for asking. It's not available for public consumption, unfortunately.

Tanta was an amazing resource during the run up to the crisis. I only ever interacted with her in comments to her blog but she was kind and so knowledgeable about the topic - “The Ubernerd’s Guide to Mortgage Servicing”

You're not going got be able to find that type of knowledge in a couple of books. I used to work as an analyst programming mortgage prospectus documents and the one thing I learned is the system is purposely obfuscating and there are several incentive systems to keep this information private.

Could you give a few hints on how to find the information though? I'd also love to hear more on the specifics of the incentives.

I've been thinking recently about just building businesses on reducing information asymmetry. Feels like you can't really go wrong there if all you want to do is make a few bucks. (Who wouldn't want to buy that?)

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