sperrys book is good. I have read it a couple of times.
I think he hits it on the head.
I haven’t read Sperry’s book, I’ve only read the reviews at Amazon. Most of what I know of the subprime market I learned during the bubble from people involved in it, other than the purely Wall Street aspects which I filled in with Tett and Smith and other writers who were involved in that end of the business.
From the reviews of Sperry, which are overwhelmingly positive, it looks like he fingers Fannie and Freddie and the CRA.
If so then he has no explanation for the explosion of subprime lending in the unregulated market, which dwarfed what F&F and the regulated lenders were doing and which was in fact taking the market away from the GSEs. The private CDO market was a rival to what the GSEs had been doing since their creation. That private market was where all of the innovation was done, the No Docs, the NINJA loans, the whole toxic mess.
There is a bias on the Left for always blaming the private sector no matter what the facts are. But there is also a bias on the Right for always blaming the government and exempting the private sector no matter what the facts are. I know people who were making tons of money in subprime lending. No government overseer was forcing them to do anything. And their bankroll came directly from Wall Street. This was all voluntary. And while my own knowledge began with personal contacts there are any number of books and articles that spell out this same information.