Too much Fed credit encouraged too much building, so prices ballooned past their economic values on the effluvium of degenerating derivatives. Now, we have foreclosures, upside-down homeowners, devalued and disappeared mortgage-makers, failed and failing banks, and a cesspool of phony investment values camouflaged by a carpet of Federal fun dollars now owed by the taxpayers. How come?
Because Congress pimped out the home mortgage industry and the Fed financed the business. First, Congress; we'll leave Fed credit faucet Greenspan's enabling for another time. Go back to 1977 and see passage of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) by compassionate legislators using other people's money to help poor folks who couldn't afford to buy homes.
Go way back in 1950, and people thought lenders were entitled to repayment and shouldn't lend to folks who couldn't repay. Mortgage lenders demanded good credit for loans in slums where credit was risky and property wasn't worth foreclosing; they outlined those areas on their maps, calling it redlining an area.
Progressives called it punishing the poor. They felt poor people with bad credit were as much entitled to home ownership as anybody. Earlier public housing was often trashed by residents; the hope was they wouldn't trash what they own.
Congressmen Barney Frank, Senator Chris Dodd, and others leaned on Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae to finance riskier mortgages, and on the regulators to push the banks into making the riskier mortgage loans. The bureaucrats at Housing and Urban Development (HUD) wrote implementing regulations. The famous Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) put a lot of effort (smiled upon by politicians) into bullying local banks into abandoning credit quality in favor of quantity with low or no down payments, cursory or no credit research, and other policies to move loan volume up among the poor. The government's bank regulators added their encouragement. Why not? The risky loans were sold off to Fannie and Freddie; they didn't stay with the original lender and the banks collected a lot of income. At this point, the consistent with safe and sound operation language you saw above got lost.
