Ok - I can see that those articles make some good points about the US housing market. However, I am not in the US, and the housing market in the UK suffered from very similar problems and, as far as I am aware, we never had any overt government support for mortgages so our mortage market looked rather more "free market" than the US one and we still ended up with similar problems. Northern Rock being the most obvious example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Rock