Lord Turner was making the point that silly derivatives, bundled together at five removes from any real asset, serve no positive purpose. In fact, such activities are a bit worse than useless. But the originators of subprime mortgages and the creators of related derivatives didn't think so. They liked to boast that they were providing access to the first rung of the housing ladder to people who had never before had the prospect of owning their own homes, or that their derivative products were "facilitating the democratisation of the housing market". Maybe it was only the shysters at the bottom of the food chain that were honest enough to think, if not to say out loud: "Here's a schmuck willing to buy a house, even though he doesn't have a job, and my company is dumb enough to let him."