No more checks come to the elderly couple from the local real estate investment company. Usually the monthly earnings from their investments in deeds of trust combine with their Social Security and their liquidating IRA to make ends meet. The investment company had told them their life savings were safe and secure in loans to real estate developers who build houses and commercial projects all over the state. No reason to worry.

When the couple complains to the company about the empty envelopes, the CEO says, "The environment changed on us. The developers we lent to can't sell their houses, because there no lenders to finance buyers. Sorry."

According to Kevin Phillips, in his latest book, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism one reason there are no lenders is that $500 billion dollars worth of securities called a "collateralized debt obligations" devised by Wall Street and exported all over the world are infected with bad subprime loans – loans that fee-seeking mortgage bankers and brokers made to borrowers who had no job, no income and no assets. The inevitable default and foreclosure of those loans continues to bring on huge international bank losses, a glut in a falling domestic housing market and the evaporation of lending capital. If loans cannot be sold in collateralized debt obligations and other factoring transactions, there are no new funds to lend. The subdivisions built with the savings of our elderly couple and thousands of others like them are unsellable.

"How could this happen?" asks the couple.

One answer may be that the fee-hungry arrangers of bad sub-prime real estate loans never stepped back to ask, "How could today's bad sub-prime loan destroy the real estate market tomorrow?

Would a loan arranger with a feminine perspective have stepped back and asked that question?