“At the top of the list of people who should have been prosecuted are Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.”
And let’s not forget Jimmy Carter for the Community Reinvestment Act and BJ Clinton for doubling down on it.
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cra-debate-a-users-guide-2009-6
If the CRA was to be the cause of the housing crisis, how come neither Ronald Reagan, GHW Bush, nor GW Bush sought to eliminate the CRA?
The answer is that the CRA contributed very little to the housing crisis. The vast majority of bad loans were funded by investment banks and hedge funds, none of which were covered by the CRA.
Too many conservatives are eager to glom onto a politically convenient but factually deficient myth about the causes of the financial crisis.
The private financial sector spent most of Clinton’s years lobbying for repeal of the Glass Steagall Act and the exemption of derivatives from any sort of regulation. And they got it.
It is not a coincidence that less than 10 years after passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 that the United States experienced another financial crisis of the sort that the Glass Steagall Act had headed off for nearly 70 years.