Leading Democrats, such as Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) whose state was hit hard by the real estate downturn, have called on lenders to halt foreclosures. But the Obama administration says a nationwide delay could devastate the fragile real estate market in places like Florida.

Although there is no Betty Ford clinic for bad lending — and the end to the nation's foreclosure troubles seems nowhere in sight, you can make money from the mortgage industry's woes.

Mortgage lending used to be a relatively sober and low-risk way to make decent amounts of money. You take money from depositors, pay them interest, and lend their money out to mortgage borrowers at a higher rate of interest. It's not a business model on a par with, say, search engine technology, but it used to be difficult to find mortgage lenders in bread lines.

To date, making bad loans is still a poor way to make money. But investing in good mortgage loans will get you a decent yield, particularly in these days of miserable returns from bank CDs.

A year and a half ago, I sat in the office of Jim Kowalski, a prosecutor turned defense attorney in Jacksonville, Florida, listening to him describe a crime that was, by then, known to anyone who'd dealt with the foreclosure process.

Kowalski worked with a small cadre of local attorneys trying to slow the area's onslaught of foreclosures. In the aggregate, they were monstrously outmatched by banks with subcontractors of subcontractors dedicated to removing families from homes quickly.

But on a case-by-case basis, they stole the advantage because they knew the mortgage industry's secret: it had buckled under the weight of its own corruption. All you had to do was force the banks' empty hand, and you could keep a client in her home.

The biggest tell came over list-serves that connected legal aid outfits and small private practices overwhelmed by the sudden demand for foreclosure defenses. As lawyers like Kowalski compared notes on the three big banks whose servicing arms controlled nearly half the mortgage market, they noticed case after case of irregularities.

Once they forced the servicers into court, the pattern became clear: everybody involved in the securities process had cut so many corners in pursuit of record profits, had operated with such disregard for the many steps that ensure a safe and sound mortgage market, that they couldn't even show who owned the debt.