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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. If I had a choice to invest at arms-length at a company who had good underwriting standards but loaned only based on liquid assets and W-2 income or in a company who very carefully underwrote loans by looking in careful detail at every applicants’ unique situation, I’m more inclined to invest in the former.

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And now your company you invested is worth half because they were too strict on loaning and have entered the death spiral where they aren’t bringing enough new loans in and fold or get bought out for much less then your original stock price.

That requires the profit from the number of loan originations to non-W2 workers to be enough higher than the costs and errors produced by detailed human underwriting (against adversarial applicants, which both W2 and non-W2 applicants are, but W2s are harder to fudge).

It’s surely possible for that assumption to be true, but I start out skeptical.

You are making the assumption that they are also not overly strict for w2. Ive found that if one is not willing to budge on one thing its usually like that across the board

What percentage of mortgages are given to self employed folks? Genuine question, I have no idea. But I wouldn’t assume it’s enough that it could rescue any company from a death spiral.

You are making the assumption that they are also not overly strict for w2. Ive found that if one is not willing to budge on one thing its usually like that across the board

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