Lies, damned lies and statistics (2)

Twats, honestly.

"A BBC investigation has found sub-prime mortgage lenders who give loans to people with bad credit records account for more than 70% of all repossessions"...whereas ... "In the US, sub-prime loans account for just 55% of foreclosures, which are the equivalent of repossession hearings".

I have seldom seem a more cretinous use of statistics.

There could be a number of reasons for this; perhaps 'sub-prime' is defined differently in the UK and the USA (with hindsight, anybody who defaults was by definition sub-prime!); perhaps there are just far more non-sub prime borrowers having their homes repossessed in the USA; perhaps there are fewer sub-prime borrowers in the US; it is only absolute figures that matter anyway; if there were 10 repossessions in the UK, 7 of whom were sub-prime (AKA 'self-certified'?) then this is not much to worry about, however if there were 1 million repossessions in the USA, of whom were 450,000 were mainstream borrowers, then it's time to panic. And so on.