Joe Nocera, who writes the Executive Suite column for the New York Times, has done an interesting thing today. He 1) points out banks are lying about their involvement in subprime mortgages, he 2) notes that Barney Frank is absolutely wrong to defend them and 3) offers documents that support his claim. This is something we used to call "journalism," and I'm happy to see it:

“There has not been a case made that there is an enforcement problem with banks,” Edward Yingling, the head of the American Bankers Association, said last week. “There is a problem with enforcement on nonbanks.”

As I wrote in my column last week, this has become something of a mantra for the banking industry. We aren’t the ones who brought the world to the brink of financial disaster, they proclaim. It was those awful nonbanks, the mortgage brokers and originators, who peddled those terrible subprime loans to unsuspecting or unsophisticated consumers. They’re the ones who need to be regulated!

Apparently, when you say something long enough and loud enough, people start to believe it, even when it defies reality. Here, for instance, is the normally skeptical Barney Frank on the subject: “What happened was an explosion of loans being made outside of the regular banking system. It was largely the unregulated sector of the lending industry and the underregulated and the lightly regulated that did that.”

To which I can now triumphantly reply: Oh, really???

Last weekend, after the column was published, an angry mortgage broker — someone who felt she and her ilk were being unfairly scapegoated by the banking industry — sent me a series of rather eye-opening documents. They were a series of fliers and advertisements that had been sent to her office (and mortgage brokers all over the country) from JPMorgan Chase, advertising their latest wares. They were dated 2005, which was before the subprime mortgage boom got completely out of control. They’re still pretty sobering.

“The Top 10 Reasons to Choose Chase for All Your Subprime Needs,” screams the headline on the first one. Another was titled, “Chase No Doc,” and described the criteria for a borrower to receive a so-called no-document loan. “Got Bank Statements?” asked a third flier. “Get Approved!” In a number of the fliers, Chase makes it clear to the mortgage brokers that the bank doesn’t need income or job verification — it just needs to look at a handful of old bank statements.

“There were mortgage brokers who acted unethically, absolutely,” my source told me when I called her on Monday. (She asked to remain anonymous because she still has to work with JPMorgan Chase and the other big banks.) “But where do you think mortgage brokers were getting the subprime mortgages they were selling to customers? From the big banks, that’s where. Chase, Bank of America — they were all doing it.” So enough already about how the banks weren’t the problem. Of course they were. Here’s the evidence, right here. Read ’em and weep.