Barney Frank Made Me Do It

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Matt Taibbi has been all over the financial crisis, doing actual shoe-leather reporting.  As opposed to "conservative bloggers" who just cut & paste what they found on each others' blogs.
Bring up the financial/housing crisis with a "Libertarian" and even most conservatives, I've found, and you will immediately get a lecture on:

• Barney Frank
• CRA
• Stupid unqualified mortgage borrowers
• Fannie & Freddie

I know this for a fact, from personal experience.
Even, for the sake of argument, if it's true that Barney Frank forced these innocent lamb financial institutions to loan to unqualified borrowers, what ensued is what was really the problem.

Here is the money quote:

Nomi Prins pointed out in her book It Takes a Pillage that we could have paid off every subprime loan in America at the start of the crisis for about $1.4 trillion dollars. But the bailouts ended up being four, five, perhaps as much as ten or twelve times that size.
Why? Because we weren’t paying off the underlying loans of those subprime, personal-responsibility-deficient homeowners. We were paying off the banks' bets on those loans. We were adopting all those clones they made.

And:   Fannie & Freddie do not originate mortgage loans!

The problem with this, and many other disputes, is that libertarians/conservatives view this stuff as left versus right, liberal versus conservative.  They perceive that only liberals think what the banks did was bad and they would rather stick a hot poker up their orifice than agree with a goddamned liberal on anything, so . . .

The size of the slice of the Blame Pie for those 4 entities above is razor thin.