The home mortgage crisis spirals, taking a toll in the U.S.

By Julie Creswell and Vikas Bajaj

Monday, March 5, 2007
Even in affluent Orange County, California, the growing wealth of executives and brokers in the booming mortgage industry was hard to miss.

For Kal Elsayed, a former executive at New Century Financial, a large lender based in Irvine, driving a red convertible Ferrari to work at a company that provided home loans to people with low incomes and weak credit might have appeared ostentatious, he now acknowledges.

But, he says, that was nothing compared with the private jets that executives at other companies had.

"You just lost touch with reality after a while because that's just how people were living," said Elsayed, 42, who spent nine years at New Century before leaving to start his own firm in 2005.

"We made so much money you couldn't believe it. And you didn't have to do anything. You just had to show up."

--MORE--