“I thought the banks were ordered to make loans with lower financial standards so that it would ‘be fair,’ against their better business sense but mandated by the House, no?”
Combination of the two. Sadly, bankers are NOT saints, and if they don’t think they have any risk, they simply will not give a damn who they lend money to, as was the case in 2008, as most of those borrowers were not EEOC types, but instead simply poor/middle class whites who wanted more than they could afford. But the banks were able to immediately sell-off the loans, so they didn’t care, and in the end we got stuck with damages, which continue to this day in the level of federal spending that shot up in 2008, but never came back down.
Combination of the two. Sadly, bankers are NOT saints,
And the government had to jump through hoops to provide the mechanism for them to do that. The relaxing of lending standards and incentives to buy weak loans were forced on FNMA and FHLMC in order to convince banks to lend to people who didn’t have the means to pay them back.