Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
The entities that made the bad loans did so because they were forced to by the gov. Gov oversight made sure that they made the gov imposed quotas of loans to people who were poor risks. So the big story was the gross incompetence of the gov.
AFAIK you're writing about two agencies/entities/organisations here. This doesn't explain why the entire banking sector got involved. To them, it was incompetence on many levels.

There's much style, yet very little substance in banking.
I've come to the conclusion that banks are likely inherently incompetent. My professional experience with banks is that there's no correlation between quality of a credit application and it being approved. They could just as well employ monkeys for approving or disapproving applications: Nobody would notice if they don't tell anyone.
The personal highlight experience of mine was a 99.9% crap credit application being approved. The only good thing about the application was the passport photo of the young blonde asking for the credit!