Maybe the most important lesson I learned as a journalist came from a story I never wrote. During the 1980s, I was under contract to a monthly magazine. Owing editors a feature article, I was assigned to write about how sky-high prices and inflation were wrecking the hopes of young professionals to buy their own homes.

Articles lamenting the plight of thwarted yuppies had appeared in Texas newspapers. I had little enthusiasm. Finance bores me.

I decided to interview one of my cleverest friends: a foreign-born real estate developer who'd studied at a prestigious American business school. He often had thought-provoking takes on other issues. Why not about his own profession?

Roberto brought me up short. Naming mutual friends, he said our parents wouldn't have dreamed of living as they did - fancy cars, foreign vacations, frequent restaurant meals - and also buying a house. Previous generations had saved for years to make a down payment.

He said articles like mine were a sure sign a sharp market correction was overdue.

The next big Texas real-estate story was the Savings & Loan crisis of the first Bush administration, caused by the very collapse my friend warned against. (Also, like the second Bush administration's banking crisis, by unwise deregulation.) Back then, everybody thought hundreds of failed Texas S & L's were a big deal.

Flash-forward 25 years.

Visiting subdivisions of 6,000-square-foot McMansions, I'd occasionally wonder, "Where's all this money coming from?"

Thin air, as it happened.

Exactly how thin can be judged from an extraordinary piece of confessional journalism by New York Times economics reporter Edmund L. Andrews. Adapted from his book "Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown," it tells how he "joined millions of otherwise-sane Americans in what we now know was a catastrophic binge on overpriced real estate and reckless mortgages. Nobody duped or hypnotized me. Like so many others - borrowers, lenders and the Wall Street dealmakers behind them - I just thought I could beat the odds."

Divorced, remarried and stuck with $4,000-a-month alimony and child support payments, Andrews and his second wife decided they just had to have a suburban home big enough for her daughter and his visiting sons. "At any other time in history, the idea of someone like me borrowing more than $400,000 would have seemed insane."

As, indeed, it was.

American Home went bust; foreclosure looms.

And we're all stuck paying for it. It's definitely possible to admire the work without admiring its author. Almost everything Andrews did was foolhardy and self-indulgent. Much of it should also have been illegal.