The housing collapse started with Jimmy Carter and his stupid CRA. (Community Reinvestment Act.) It collected racial data for housing loans.
Bill Clinton gets into office and immediately asserted that the racial disparity in loans indicates institutional racism in our banking industry, and he immediately applies pressure to force the issue of loans to people who were previously regarded as bad credit risks.
These people were heavily represented by minorities. Clinton had help from his congressional allies like Barney Frank.
The point is, without Clinton forcing the fedgov to demand banks issue these loans, and if the Clinton infested fedgov had not indicated they would back up these bad loans, the vast bulk of these loans would never have happened, and thus the Housing caused financial crises would also never have happened.
So we owe the financial collapse to the fact that George HW Bush lied to America.
It was Clinton, on November 12, 1999, whe signed the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act which repealed parts of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. Specifically, provisions in the 1933 Glass-Steagall act that prohibit a bank holding company from owning other financial companies were repealed. Economists Robert Ekelund and Mark Thornton have criticized the Act as contributing to the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis.