Anybody with three functioning brain cells knew by say, late 2005, that the housing market was wildly overvalued. Anyone who said otherwise was either ignorant, or lying out of self interest.
All George Bush had to do was to make it clear in late '05 or early '06 that there would be no bailouts, that the banks' owners were 100 percent at risk for any bad investment decisions they had made.
That's an excellent idea. And the bad decisions the government pushed them into would be paid for by whom?