Mortgage Bankers: Desperate to Lend

The deals get better because things aren't that profitable:

The industry's underlying problem is simple: Overcapacity and a drop in profitability from its all-time high of 2003. And that's not the claim of an industry gadfly. It's the analysis of the sector's own top economist, Douglas Duncan, the chief economist of the Mortgage Bankers Assn. Duncan told BusinessWeek on June 23 that profits fell by 70% from 2003 to 2004 among 70 lenders that supply their internal data to the trade group.

Businessweek