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Bloomberg to OWS: Congress caused the mortgage crisis, not the banks
...Lenders faced a nightmare regulatory threat and so began to “bend” their lending standards to demonstrate compliance. Congress helped by authorizing Fannie and Freddie to buy up subprime mortgages at a higher rate in order to incentivize compliance. That opened the floodgates, as Fannie and Freddie essentially ended any risk for lenders in the subprime market, and it also opened up a significant incentive for so-called “predatory lending.” After all, why not give consumers more credit than they could handle if the original lender didn’t have to bear the cost of failure?...