You should read “The Great American Bank Robbery” by Paul Sperry and/or “The Housing Boom And Bust” by Thomas Sowell.
Bush’s first two appointments to Secretary of the Treasury were not bankers and both tried to warn Bush, Hastert and Frist against the irresponsible fiscal policy the GOP was pursuing. Bush fired both of them and appointed the Chairman of Goldman Sachs, Henry Paulson, to the job. Goldman is the lead bank in the New York banking cartel that controls most of the investment capital in the United States.
When the financial crisis hit, Bush went into hiding and abdicated the crisis management to Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke (a Bush appointment) and Timothy Geithner (another Fed appointee during the Bush years). He essentially turned the foxes loose in the chicken coop. They immediately made bailing out the banks and Wall Street investment firms their first priority at the expense of the US taxpayer. They also engineered TARP and the first GM bailout.
The other option was to force the “too big to fail” banks into a formal bankruptcy restructuring resulting in the stockholders, bondholders, and management taking a haircut while protecting the depositors through the FDIC. The banks would have restructured, much like the airlines did previously. There would have been a sharp deep recession and followed by a strong recovery under sound banking practices.
Bush, Paulson, Bernanke, Geithner, and the GOP politicians protected the bankers, their bondholders, and stockholders while piling billions of debt on the taxpayer and ensuring a long protracted recession. By institutionalizing the concept of “too big to fail” in the banking community, and holding anyone on Wall Street accountable, they gave a green light to Wall Street returning to wild speculation with depositor money.
Bush set the stage for Obama. He made choices, most of them bad. Obama has been terrible but Bush cannot escape accountability when the history of this era is written.