Making money cheap for mortgages is the mechanism the financial industry used---they used derivative technology in a largely-failed attempt to reduce the risks[1] of a class of extremely risky loans, loans would would never have been made without the derivatives. I'd argue that this benefited the financial industry much more than even "existing owners."

Buying real estate cheap and selling it for great profit, as a rule, only works once. If you use the proceeds to buy back into the same market, you're buying expensive property; you only actually see the profit if you move to East Bumford and buy cheap property that isn't appreciating. Further $750k or even several million isn't enough to get into the 1%. But skimming a few percent in fees off of millions of transactions is nigh unlimited money.