The reason there were $1 Trillion in subprime loans doled out is because the Wall Street guys engineered all these derivative products that chopped up the loans into different pieces.
We were told that by creating these derivative products that the risk from such low credit loans was much smaller and a real business of subprime lending could be created.
The derivatives ponzi scheme attracted all sorts of legitimate money into these funding vehicles.
If you went direct to Bank of America in year 2000 and said you wanted to make $1 trillion in subprime loans they would have laughed you out the door. But if you chopped them up in undecipherable pieces so complicated that Standard and Poor’s would slap a rating on them, you then had a buyer.
Bank of America and every other major bank, and Fannie and Freddie, was led by the nose by Clinton, Cuomo, Frank, Rangel, Raines, Johnson, et al to a big steaming pile of crap and told to spoon it down. And they did, and earned a pile of fees of their own in doing so.
Low interest rates and rising house prices kept the chickens from coming home to roost.
Until now.