Wall Street bankers were following the mandates, arm twisting pressure, and regulation imposed on them by the U.S. Congress. It started with Carter, continued in a reasonable manner during Reagan and Bush 41, began to escalate when we had a Democratic president AND Democratic Congress during Clinton and continued from there through Bush 43 until the housing bubble it created burst in the last half of 2008.
If you want to fix the problem you start with Congress and make it illegal to push Wall Street to do anything via flawed regulation and unsustainable policy that created the housing bubble in the first place. And you reinstate sensible banking policy that requires people to have an investment in the property they borrow if the government is going to back the loans and/or the money and that people have a track record of repayment of the loans they take out before they get one.
I think if Newt Gingrich and the Republicans had been in Congress when the dangers in the housing bubble first surfaced, he would have acted to mitigate the damage and would have reversed the process. Unfortunately we had a Democratic Congress with the process being ignored by Pelosi and Reid and being spearheaded by Frank and Dodd who repeatedly reassured everybody that all was well.
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No, wall street bankers are not solely responsible for the crisis, they are responsible for some of the crisis. so are the ratings agencies and so is ben bernanke and turbo tax timmy along with Bawney Fwank and Chrissy Dodd who probobly share a good portion of the blame. But the truth of the matter is if the deadbeats who took out the mortgages paid them there would be no crisis. The banks were wrong for lending those deadbeats money, but they did so as a result of government and FED policy going back more than 30 years. If the government didn't make it possible through Fanny and freddy, the loans would have never happenned. if anything, the bankers are the LEAST responsible of all the responsible parties, and the government is the MOST responsible of all the responsible parties. They all however share culpability.
