How did the libs start doing that at a time when Republicans controlled the White House and both Houses of Congress?
With a Jimmy Carter era law that worked just fine throughout the 1980's and most of the 1990's?
The law says you cannot turn down somebody for a loan because of race, creed or color but nowhere does the law say you cannot turn down somebody for a loan because of the fact that they can't possibly repay what you are loaning.
Not everything in life boils down to libs vs conservatives.
Some things in life simply boil down to getting hoodwinked by a sleazebag that wants your money in his pocket.
What happened was a scam, a con game, a swindle.
Specifically, it was a classic Pigeon Drop " in which a mark or "pigeon" is convinced to give up a sum of money in order to secure the rights to a larger sum of money, or more valuable object. In reality the scammers make off with the money and the mark is left with nothing."
Unless you understand how the con game worked, you will not understand that the props (not the pigeons - the props) of the con game involved not only poor minority "house buyers" that borrowed $300,000 they could never repay to buy a $100,000 house but also included middle class "house buyers" with good middle class jobs that borrowed $850,000 they could never afford to repay to buy a $300,000 house.
***IMPORTANT***
The "pigeon" of this scam was the mutual fund manager of your own 401K. Therefore, you, by proxy, were the pigeon of the con game.
The illegal aliens, the deadbeats without jobs or low income workers borrowing $300,000 they could never hope to repay or the middle class guy with a middle class job borrowing $850,000 they could not afford to repay were merely the props of the con game.
***IMPORTANT***
The mortgage mess was created by loan brokers who were not lending their own money. They were just creating phony Pigeon Drop mortgages to sell to gullible investors. Let's be clear here. That "gullible investor" was NOT the house "buyer". It was a mutual fund manager, maybe in a mutual fund in your own 401K, or a foreign investor wanting to invest in the U.S.
At the time, the stock market was not red hot like it was during the Tech Bubble and interest rates on CD's were pretty low.
However, Americans were lining up for big mortgages that they promised to repay at a good interest rate after a few years at an introductory "teaser" rate.
As a long term investment, buying the rights to those mortgage loans seemed a pretty good investment and Wall Street's customers wanted to buy them up.
So, loan brokers would write up mortgages, they would be bundled up in financial instruments and would them be sold off to your 401K manager or to that foreign investor.
Everytime that happened, the loan broker would get a good commission.
Life was good for a loan broker.
There was one problem, however. Although there was a high demand for that product and investors wanted to buy up more and more of those mortgage loans, the supply of creditworthy borrowers was running out.
What to do?
Simple.
Just sign up borrowers without a snowball's chance in hell of repaying the loans. Mix those loans up with better loans in a package and the pigeons would still eat then up on Wall Street.
So, the loan brokers started creating mortgages by getting anybody, ANYBODY with a pulse (and even some dead people without pulses, as investigators discovered) to get their names on mortgages. The worthless mortgages were then sold to eager Wall Street investors, maybe the manager of your own 401K.
As the demand for these "great investments" grew, illegal aliens, native born Americans without jobs or good credit, people with good credit wanting to borrow three times what they could actually repay to buy a house at three times the price a real market could actually bear and even dead people had their names put on these Pigeon Drop mortgages.
And Wall Street's customers just kept buying that worthless paper up.
For the loan brokers, it was just like writing a commission check to themselves, having a drunk downtown sign it, taking the check to your 401K manager than then having your 401K manager give him you 401K money in exchange for that check.
That is why loan brokers were getting filthy rich.
Every time such a worthless Pigeon Drop mortgage was sold on Wall Street to a 401K mutual fund manager ....KA-CHING..... the loan brokers got richer with commissions.
The loan brokers who rounded up illegals and dead people's names to put on the dotted line for "loans" they could never hope to repay knew exactly what they were doing: They was swindling YOUR mutual fund manager out of YOUR money and they knew it.
How's your 401K doing lately?
The mutual fund managers and investors around the world, plus the legions of Freepers who used to argue that there was no such thing as the Housing Bubble all swallowed the loan broker's Pigeon Drop swindle hook, line and sinker.
The loan brokers who left the game early got filthy rich. The ones who stayed in the game too long are now in deep kimchee because the "pigeons" wised up and are no longer buying their worthless product.
