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Banks traditionally did not give mortgages to people with bad credit histories. Congress ordered them to make the loans available and end economic discrimination, because it supposedly wasn’t “fair”. So, they made them stop discriminating against historically poor people.

For the record, the term for what the banks was doing is called Redlining. Economically based redlining should be allowed, as people from poorer neighborhoods are less likely to pay back their loans on time. Congress tried to wipe it out and it ultimately backfired.

""Speaking at a business breakfast in midtown featuring Bloomberg and two former New York City mayors, Bloomberg was asked what he thought of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. 'I hear your complaints,' Bloomberg said. 'Some of them are totally unfounded. It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I'm not saying I'm sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn't have gotten them without that. 'But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will.

"'They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it's one target, it's easy to blame them and Congress certainly isn't going to blame themselves. At the same time, Congress is trying to pressure banks to loosen their lending standards to make more loans.'" He's right about that. The subprime thing is in the process of being repeated. So Bloomberg gets it right. So now, more and more people see it. See, everybody knows this. Everybody knows the banks didn't do it. Everybody knows it was Congress -- and Democrat presidents, by the way -- responsible for the collapse of the home industry. It's very simple. It's just now that more and more people are starting to acknowledge it. "

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