Well you’re doing a service by making us go back and examine our assumptions. The financial meltdown was something of a perfect storm and it’s hard to sort it all out even for the tiny number of us who find all of this engrossing.
I’ve been a critic of those who want to blame it all on the CRA because I was aware of the huge amount of exotic mortgages that were cranked out by the shadow banks that were exempt from the CRA- they were rolling their own CDOs and derivatives built upon them because they were making a fortune doing so, and stealing market share from stodgy old Fannie and Freddy with their low-yield conforming paper. But toddster dug up that info about the GSEs being pressured to make 55% of their loans Alt-A so the gov’t role may be bigger than I was accounting for.