‘Alan Greenspan blanched. “Why did you do it?” he asked, appalled. There I was, a 52-year-old economics reporter, telling the former chairman of the Federal Reserve how I’d taken out one of the reckless mortgages that were drowning the nation. And I was about to default.’ New York Times journalist Edmund L Andrews on his own $500,000 credit meltdown
Edmund L Andrews, The Guardian – 11 July 2009
It was December 2007, and I felt like a teenager who had just told his father he’d crashed the family car. If there is anybody who should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe, it is me. A reporter for the New York Times, I have been the paper’s chief eyes and ears on the American Federal Reserve for the past six years.
I watched Alan Greenspan and his successor, Ben S Bernanke, at close range. I wrote several early-warning stories in 2004 about the spike in high-risk mortgages. Yet in the same year, I joined millions of otherwise sane Americans in what we now know was a catastrophic binge on overpriced property and reckless mortgages.
Nobody duped me, hypnotised me, or lulled me with drugs. Like so many others, I thought I could beat the odds. Everybody had a reason for getting in trouble. The brokers and deal-makers were scoring huge commissions.
The ordinary home buyers wanted to own their first houses, or bigger houses, or holiday homes. Some were greedy, some desperate, some deceived. As for me, I had two utterly compelling reasons: the money was there, and I was in love. At 48, I had separated from my wife after a 21-year marriage and was eager to start a new life with my then fiancee, Patricia Barreiro.
Patty had been one of my closest friends when we were students at an American high school in Argentina. I was the bookish, unathletic son of an American diplomat, Patty the sexy and cerebral daughter of an Argentine doctor.
We met to talk about politics and books at a coffee shop every day after school, but we were never romantic, and had gone our separate ways after high school. She was now a mother of four in Los Angeles and had recently divorced after 25 years of marriage.
We poured out our feelings in long conversations on the telephone, night after night, and by the spring of 2004 we were making plans for her to move to Washington, and trying to figure out how we were going to pull it off with our limited resources.
