mortgage market would have learned its lesson about subprime mortgages earlier in the 2000s, and the worst excesses would have been checked before they spun out of control and toppled the entire economy, causing $19.2 trillion in lost household wealth and eight million lost jobs—and that was just in the United States. The earliest predatory mortgage lending victims, disproportionately black, were the canaries in the coal mine, but their warning went unheeded.
