Well, no, Hate Radio just tells you what you want to hear...
Contrary to conservative arguments, the 2008 housing crisis was caused by unregulated and loosely regulated private financial entities—not the federal government’s support for homeownership.
www.americanprogress.org
In the early 2000s, the government and GSE share of the mortgage market began to decline as the purely private securitization market, called the private label securities market, or PLS, expanded. During this period, there was a dramatic expansion of mortgage lending, a large portion of which was in subprime loans with predatory features.21 The majority of this mortgage lending was existing homeowners refinancing, with many believing that they were taking advantage of lower interest rates to extract home equity. Instead, they often were exposed to complex and risky products that quickly became unaffordable when economic conditions changed.22 Linked with the expansion of predatory lending and the growth of the PLS market was the repackaging of these risky loans into complicated products through which the same assets were sold multiple times throughout the financial system.
This spread the danger of risky mortgage loans, systematizing the housing market’s risks throughout the global financial system.23 These developments occurred in an environment characterized by minimal government oversight and regulation and depended on a perpetually low interest rate environment where housing prices continued to rise and refinancing remained a viable option to continue borrowing. When the housing market stalled and interest rates began to rise in the mid-2000s, the wheels came off, leading to the 2008 financial crisis.
There is near consensus among experts that the housing crisis was caused primarily by the rise of predatory lending and products with exotic features marketed to consumers without adequate information or preparation and sometimes using fraudulent information, as well as the failure of the PLS market.24 But some conservatives have continued to question the basic tenets of federal housing policy and have placed the blame for the crisis on government support for mortgage lending. This attack is focused on mortgage lending by the FHA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s support of mortgage markets, and the CRA’s lending incentives for underserviced communities. These claims directed at federal housing policy are at odds with the evidence.