This Mortgage Market Mess Can Be Traded

By Peter Navarro, a business professor at the Merage School of Business at UC Irvine and a regular CNBC contributor.

So let me be the microcosm of everything that's wrong with how our politicians and financial institutions are handling the mortgage crisis.

I recently refinanced my mortgage -- shaved about 100 basis points off my 30-year fixed and lowered my monthly payment by a few hundred bucks.

The good news is that guys like me with more money in their pocket might spend more and help stimulate the economy, just like the president wants us to. The bad news is that I'm probably the last guy in California who needs help in the mortgage market. It's the old saw -- the only people who can borrow money are the people who don't really need it.

Meanwhile, foreclosures in the Golden State continue apace for the poor saps who either got suckered into loans they couldn't afford or who got too greedy taking on loans they knew they really couldn't afford, unless housing prices continued into the stratosphere.

Of course, the serious policy problem I'm getting at here, which actually provides a great trading opportunity, is that our mortgage lending system continues to deny new mortgage money to a whole gaggle of people who really need it. And if these folks can't get refinanced, they will be foreclosed upon, the credit crisis paralyzing the global economy will be prolonged, and there will be a continued massive shift of assets from the many foreclosed homeowners to the few who can scoop up the distressed properties, while the mortgage banks make out like bandits.