Matt Padilla is the son of two Ph.D.'s, though he stopped at a bachelor's in business administration from U.C. Berkeley. He attended in the early 1990s, when both Cal and Stanford had top 10 football teams. Padilla graduated in 1994, amid a recession, but managed to land a job as a management trainee (glorified intern) at Franklin Templeton Mutual Funds.Finding his creativity constrained, he moved back home to O.C. and became a journalist. Finding his creativity constrained again, he moved to Madrid, Spain in 1999 and taught English at businesses to pay the bills while writing short stories (never published). By pure chance, he ended up teaching English at Grupo Prisa, Spain's largest media company and one of his gigs was to teach the managers of '40 Principales' (stands for top 40), one of the most popular radio stations in Spain at the time.
Today Padilla may be the only business journalist in the world with a blog on the mortgage industry, with the Register's "Mortgage Insider" blog. He has covered the rise and fall of subprime lenders and current troubles by lenders in the credit categories above subprime, including prophetic pieces that outlined industry woes before they exploded.