If we look at the mortgage pipeline, the problems become obvious, but none of them have to do with the government, except in that the government should have regulated.

Start with the mortgage origination companies like Countrywide who could easily offload mortgages to the other banks to collateralize. Since these companies could completely offload their risk, they were highly incentivized to give a mortgage to everyone.

Move on to the rating companies and the big banks creating financial products of doom and you've got the whole mess. All without the government "creating the problem." I do agree, however, that the government giving these companies an implied put option via a bailout gave them every reason they needed to take huge risks.

Still amazes me that no one from the banks ended up in jail.

Secondly, the author of that article is pretty clearly shilling to privatize Fannie Mae.

Thirdly, nobody here seems to understand what the community lending standards actually were and just wants to use it as a post to rest their argument on.

This is a much better, though still critical of the CRA article that goes into actual detail on what the problems were: https://www.city-journal.org/html/financial-crisis-and-cra-1...

But it's still an overly reductive and misguided argument. As Noah Smith points out here: https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/did-risky-mortga...