Because he thinks they have a really cool name.
re: “Why he fought so hard to squash regulation or why he pushed Fannie and Freddie to get involved with making loans to people who could not afford them?”
This author is incompetent. Barney never, ever squashed regulation of anything. To PUSH for something the way Barney did is in fact regulation. The author makes the false assumption that regulation is only regulation if it is the kind of regulation he prefers.
This intellectual dishonesty is rampant. Enron is said to have exploited an de-regulated energy market. That is blatantly false. What happened was that the regulations changed from one regulatory approach to a different regulatory approach. Enron tried to exploit the gap between the two different approaches that existed.
The same is true of CA under Greyout Davis. Californika shifted from one type of regulation to a different type of regulation and created its own disaster.
The same is true of banking. Previously many banks were state regulated. That shifted to being Federally regulated. Those two disparate regulatory systems created an opportunity to exploit the gap.
Gramm-Leach-Bliley and other Clinton era activity was not de-regulation. In fact the regulations increased. But it was a drastic change from one set of regulations to a totally different set of regulations. The new regulations were more complex with more loopholes to be exploited.