True Casey

Caption: You too can be like Casey Serin. All it takes is a few financial mis-steps and "massive focused action"

Ok, I'm a dork. I didn't come home straight from work and turn on the TV today. No....I turned on "true casey."

Who the hell is casey? The scrawny-foreign-living with his parents is usually not my type. But I'm unusually attracted to the trainwreck that is truecasey.com. For those of you that don't know. Casey Serin is also known as the "Poster Boy of the subprime mortgage crisis." He once took out mortgages for seven homes nearly simultaneously. He has since lost these homes to foreclosure. His idea was to (I suppose) to flip these homes for a profit. However, he bought these homes at the crest of the mortgage bubble, and was unable to find a willing buyer.

I actually came across him initially through my business, though he does not know it. You see, while he was making headlines as the "Poster boy" or even the "World's most hated blogger." I was working as a lowly Credit Risk Analyst for a company focused on saving Wall Street Investors from as much of the subprime crisis as possible. As an analyst, your job details highly rely on research. I saw his story in the Economist, and thought he would be very interesting to research. As a result of my research, I found that our investors had exposure on four of his loans. The loans were all originated as "Owner Occupant" loans. Which is obivously a lie. But anyhow, even after I discovered the exposure, I was still fascinated by the story.

So it's been over a year since he lost his last property to foreclosure. What is he doing? He is living with his parents, and blogging for a living. Or maybe not for any actual income, but just for something to do. He has a "TV show" where you can watch him work. For the life of me, I do not see the appeal. I wouldn't even want to watch me work, and I deal with billions of dollars a day. But I do have to say, the most interesting part of the experience are the "haters". The haters discuss Casey's mis-steps. Some of the haters comments come out of love and affection for Casey. Other comments are meant to be funny. Some are just downright cruel.

I can only hope that Casey learns from this experience, and capitalizes on the number of experts he now has at his finger tips. Judging from my year of silently observing Casey however, I'm not sure. I guess I can't TOTALLY blame him. He probably has a lot of input, maybe too much. And even for the best, it can be hard to filter out the bad input from the good.

Still, it would probably boost his credibility exponentially if he were to spell things correctly, and not make such a big deal about getting up at 5 am.