I think it was a little more complicated that that.Again, that's backwards. The housing bubble was a direct and predicted result of the government forcing lenders to provide easy credit to people that could never hope to pay it back. This caused an enormous and historical increase in the homeownership percentage in this country, i.e. a bubble. It popped. The banking industry gets blamed for some of the clever ways they sought to protect themselves from the risk they were forced to take on, some of which arguably included fraud, but the root cause of the risky situation was government fiat. The law of unintended consequences writ large.
When I moved here I had zero income, yet I was able to get a nice 5 year fixed/adjustable loan at about 3.25%. In the good old days that would never had happened because of regulations.
The money for all those loans would not have even been available if they hadn't allowed the investment banks to join in the housing market. Yep it took a village to pull that one off.