The one thing you don't mention is the govt. pushing subpar loans. I was the mortgage officer of a community bank for over 20 yrs and I saw how this all went down. All of a sudden the Feds decided we needed a CRA officer under the employ of our bank. I was monitored once monthly to see how many minorities I was lending to. I failed miserably in that due to the following reasons:
Our community only had a small percentage of minorties of Spanish or Black makeup
Credit scores of the ones that did apply were dismal, had they been white I would of turned them down at the first meeting
Income levels at first glance were enough to decline them......
So don't put the blame strictly on the banks who were subject to large fines and in my case even the fear of losing my job. This whole fiasco can be placed at the foot of the Dems with their CRA and affordable lending programs. It never had anything to do with discrimination ,it had to do with qualifications. We were doing just fine being prudent in our lending until the govt. stepped in
The democrats did everything that folks here have said they did, and more. But that is only part of the story. It also took the fed pushing liquidity to make the funds available to do this. It took compromised RINOs to pass TARP to try to make everyone whole at taxpayer expense. Unfortunately, the whole fiasco cannot be placed at the feet of just the Dems, but rather at the feet of all the willing participants, including the wives of my submarine buddies who became real estate agents in the late 1970s and suggested that housing had nowhere to go but up.
It was the world's greatest ponzi scheme ever, a towering house of cards promising untold wealth and happiness to many of us, but at the expense at all of us. Some got rich and will stay rich. Overall, it is the most massive fraudulently invented scheme for malinvestment foisted on human kind, and we are all the poorer for it.