The people who couldn’t qualify for mortgages don’t know just how lucky they are:

A group of the nation’s real estate reporters went back to school last week in Charlotte, N.C., where a top housing economist explained, among other things, why they shouldn’t panic when delinquency and foreclosure rates move higher, as they inevitably will.

“There’s no question” that late payments will rise, Doug Duncan, chief economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association, told the journalists. “But it’s not going to be a disaster.” It won’t be that big a deal when the repossessions rise, either, Duncan said at the National Association of Real Estate Editors annual conference at the Marriott Hotel, adding that the percentage change in the foreclosure rate is a far more important indicator than the absolute number.

Important to whom? Seems to me the families losing their homes might have more trouble with the latter, but then, that’s just me. I’m sure the reporters they’ve spent so much money “training” will see it their way, though.

“The number of foreclosures is absolutely going to go up,” he said. “But the percentage could fall.” Equally as important, the housing economist added, is that the mortgage market “has already priced in” the fact that take-backs “have to go higher.”

“The number of foreclosures is absolutely going to go up,” he said. “But the percentage could fall.”

“If there’s a weakening in employment, it will lead you to (weakening) house prices,” he said. “That’s the market ‘normalizing,’ but it’s not a price bubble, it’s an employment problem.”

This is a particularly irksome practice. Industry decides it’s getting a bad image in the press (Like, how often does that happen?) and decides to offer an “educational” training seminar, all expenses paid, to the press.

First of all, reporters shouldn’t be accepting expensive freebies from industry. Period. They put you up in a nice hotel, they feed you, and now you’re primed to believe what they say. “That poor beleaguered mortgage industry!” you tell yourself. “They’re really misunderstood, you know?” And their investment has already started to pay off.

The Republicans do this a lot, too. (Which tells me the Democrats are dopes for not keeping up, but for some reason, liberals have this silly idea that journalists are above such influence. I don’t know what planet they live on, but whatever.)

Think about this: Mortgage companies made a lot of money in the past decade on sub-prime mortgages, balloon mortgages and other creative devices for parting people from the maximum amount of profit up front and then leaving them dangling over the financial cliff.

The MBA economist conceded that lenders are digging deeper than they ever have into the pool of riskier borrowers, and that adding higher mortgage rates and the shift to non-traditional loan products into the mix doesn’t bode well for late rates.

But he predicted that higher delinquencies “won’t be a macro event that melts the housing market,” as some prognosticators have warned.

No. It’ll just destroy someone’s world. No big deal.

Some time in the last 20 years, we lost track of the idea that people are behind statistics, and that for each foreclosure, there’s a human tragedy. A family loses its home. And they talk about it so blithely.

Greed is good. Money is a sign of God’s favor. Who doesn’t know that?