Quote from nyxtrader:
Actually, YOU are way off base.
There never were laws that would prevent lenders from making bad loans. Nothing was deregulated by the Bush Administration in that regard. Lenders did their best to not make bad loans.
Then the Clinton Administration rewrote the CRA to REQUIRE loans be made to low credit quality borrowers. And engaged FNMA and FRE to buy these loans.
In early 1993 President Bill Clinton ordered new regulations for the CRA which would increase access to mortgage credit for inner city and distressed rural communities. The new rules went into effect on January 31, 1995 and featured: requiring strictly numerical assessments to get a satisfactory CRA rating; using federal home-loan data broken down by neighborhood, income group, and race; encouraging community groups to complain when banks were not loaning enough to specified neighborhood, income group, and race; allowing community groups that marketed loans to targeted groups to collect a fee from the banks.
The CRA was public policy that DROVE the market. To cast a blind eye that obvious econic fact and simply blame "the profit motive" is ludicrous.
Granted, no one intened to lose money, but, to lay blame on capitalism when the real source of the problem was government in the first place indicates to me a fundamental lack of economic understanding.