This whole situation is constantly being played here as an US-good them-bad thingy, and that is not realistic.
The pubbies enjoyed the Wall Street looseness just as much as the dems.
It’s not like the high powered lobbyists were saying to themselves “Which dem do we work on tonight? We might as well not even bother with trying to bribe the pubbies, because they’re such and upstanding group”.
They both made out like bandits.
Wall Street doing well isn’t in and of itself a problem.
Fannie and Freddie having been forced to enable banks to continue cranking out the bad loans that they were being forced to make was a problem. Wall Street’s reeling in the cash while overlooking the eventual fallout from the loans was only an amplification of the core mortgage issue.