Interesting read and pretty accurate IMO.

Now Can We Finally Be Honest About What Caused the Financial Meltdown?
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A really balanced look at the question:

I like the last one

Now that the election is over, can we finally be honest about what caused the housing crisis and the resulting financial meltdown? It’s really not rocket science. Here's what happened:

1. Thanks to Jimmy Carter and the Democrats, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was passed, laying the groundwork for the feds to pressure banks to make risky loans to low-income people. Only a few of the bad home loans were from CRA-covered institutions, but CRA itself paved the way for the destructive federal pressure on banks that came later. BLAME: Democrats.

2. Republicans made things a lot worse by making it possible for bad home loans to cause a wider range of damage than they could cause otherwise, by pushing for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. A very bad move. Most Democrats went along, but many expressed reservations in doing so. The repeal bill passed with a veto-proof majority, so Clinton signed it. The bill was largely the fault of the Republicans. They're the ones who pushed for it. BLAME: Republicans.

3. Under Bill Clinton, federal bureaucrats began to exert pressure on banks to make home loans to low-income people. It got to the point where banks could be penalized for not making enough home loans to low-income people. Had it not been for this pressure, very few high-risk loans to low-income folks would have been made, and we would not be in the mess we're in today. BLAME: Democrats.

4. Under Bush and Congressional Republicans, this disastrous policy continued, partly because GOP lawmakers wanted to help low-income Hispanics own homes. BLAME: Republicans.

5. But, to their credit, Bush and Congressional Republicans realized the disaster that was in the making at Freddie and Fannie, and repeatedly tried to impose tough oversight on those institutions. The Democrats blocked them every single time, claiming the GOP was just trying to keep minorities from owning homes. Although Freddie and Fannie don't make loans themselves, they do make it possible, through loan security and other means, for other institutions to make loans, and many/most of those loans were made to low-income people. So if tougher regulations had been imposed on Freddie and Fannie, the making of high-risk loans to low-income people, many of them minorities, would have been substantially curtailed, which was why the Democrats screamed "racism." BLAME: Democrats.

6. Freddie and Fannie used those bad home loans for mortgage-backed securities, and several huge private firms used them for default credit swaps (e.g., AIG). The Republicans failed to ensure that the default credit swaps were regulated. They had tried to do something about Freddie and Fannie bundling bad home loans for mortgage-backed securities, but they did nothing about the disastrous default credit swaps. Furthermore, Bush didn't make a big enough issue out of the need to reform Freddie and Fannie. He exerted a modest effort, but a full-court press was warranted. BLAME: Freddie and Fannie, Private Financial Giants, Consumers Who Bought Homes They Couldn't Afford.

7. When those high-risk home loans began to go into default, all the investments that were based on them lost most of their value, costing our economy trillions of dollars.

That's it. That's exactly what happened. If you can't admit this, then you are blinded by partisan politics and/or ideology.

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