Bush never forced any banker to make any loans. Bankers made loans (and made loans they later acknowledged were risky) because they were able to sell those loans to Wall Street firms who securitized them and sold them to invetors. Wall Street was able to sell them to investors because rating agencies labeled many toxic securities as AAA investment grade securities.
From top to bottom, those participating in that sales chain did so because their activities were profitable. As long as they were paid to rate crap as AAA, the rating agencies labeled crap as AAA. As long as rating agencies labeled crap as AAA, ignorant investors would buy that crap . As long as investors were willing to buy securities, Wall Street was willing to create and sell them. And, as long as Wall Street would purchase loans, lenders were willing to create them.
See if you can find one banker in this country who will say that Bush forced him to make any loan, ever.
First, there were all kinds of coercive efforts forcing banks to make bad loans: from the need for high CRA scores to get acquisitions approved, to the government funded ACORN forcing banks to make lending commitments, to the Federal Reserve’s claims that banks were discriminating if they didn’t make loans representative by racial category and therefore determining that it was discriminatory to require traditional metrics for lending, to the subsidized Fannie, Freddie, etc., making it only practical for banks to sell to them (or the parallel securitization network that the investment banks finally went through the full value chain on)—there were all kinds of coercive efforts forcing banks not to apply sound traditional standards. Again, the reasoning was that such standards were discriminatory. Bush not only did nothing to reverse that, but he further pushed zero-down loans, with the focus on that as a tool for lifting minority homeownership.
I’ve had bankers tell me how reliably their banks lost money on the minority lending programs that the regulators forced them to inact.