The community reinvestment act is to blame for the housing bubble...
not even close... there was nothing in the CRA requiring banks to lend money to unqualified borrowers. all it did was stop redlining, which basically was banks not lending in minority areas, no matter how qualified the borrowers.
them bundling bad debt and playing a shell game among themselves was the problem.
then they encouraged borrowers to overextend and take out the equity from their homes..
they'd say, refinance... then put the money into fixing up the house.. .it will increase the value of the house. then they'd give them ARM's and say, don't worry... as soon as the rate balloons, we'll refi you again.
so what happened to these borrowers five years later when the rate exploided, is that the value had dropped out of the market as the banks started to implode, and money dried up.. so you had people who now owed more on their houses than the houses were worth so they couldn't refi... they couldn't afford to pay... and they had a property that sucked away all of their life savings.
i know that it behooves extremists to look for simple and simplistic answers, but there was a lot of failure that led to the crash... mostly from not enforcing bank regs.