But we were never quite sure the white mortgage man was not going to take the house.
Yet my daily visits to the site, especially essential this winter, still occasion the appearance of familiar attractions in the cheap-Web-ad stable: The Juggling Refinancer (lower your payments), The Headless Muscular Red Torso (cut out the fat), and (everybody's favorite) Constipated, Beady-Eyed Old Mortgage Man (enter your age and calculate your new house payment, or just run in terror).
For hour after hour on Tuesday, Democrats and Republicans interrogated Goldman's mortgage men, including the chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and Fabrice Tourre, the employee named in the S.E.C. complaint, putting them on the spot over Wall Street's questionable conduct at a legislatively propitious moment.
She used it, prosecutors said, to obtain a $440,000 mortgage in the man's name and spent much of the money to pay her debts.
His father was a mortgage banker, "a man in a business suit, not a hot dog impresario," like Cal's father in "Middlesex".
"You got a fortress mortgage finance system, man, this thing's going to be rock solid, nothing's going to blow it away," Zandi said, on a conference call with reporters.
Mr. Fishbein said the most likely reason for the disparity was that women were less familiar with the mortgage market than men and were therefore less likely to shop around for the best mortgage deal.
Mr. Fishbein said that although the data he used for the study did not include credit scores and debt-to-income ratios, this would not have been enough to explain the mortgage discrepancies between men and women.
In fact, those who earn less than the median income in their region are nearly two and a half times more likely to receive a subprime mortgage than white men with the same incomes.
In January 2008, Countrywide, the company he had built from a two-man mortgage operation into a lending behemoth, had to sell itself to Bank of America at a bargain price because it was being smothered by losses tied to a mountain of sketchy loans.
LONDON — The deputy head of the watchdog agency that regulates Britain's banks resigned hurriedly on Wednesday after he was accused of firing a whistle-blower who had warned in 2004 that Halifax Bank of Scotland, or HBOS, the fast-expanding mortgage lender both men then worked for, was accumulating levels of debt that put it at unacceptably high risk.
