Crime scene investigation: The premeditated assault on the prime mortgage
...As early as 1991, community activist Gale Cincotta, was laying the path for undertaking such an assault in her testimony before the Senate Banking Committee. "Lenders will respond to the most conservative standards unless [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] are aggressive and convincing in their efforts to expand historically narrow underwriting," she stressed....

...The first was the ironically named "Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992." At the behest of ACORN and other community advocacy groups and with the support of Fannie Mae, Congress imposed affordable housing (AH) mandates on Fannie and Freddie. HUD was established as their AH mission regulator. Within 18 months after passage of the 1992 Act, Jim Johnson. Fannie's chairman committed the company to "transforming the housing finance system" and vowed to "provide $1 trillion in targeted lending."

This was followed in 1995 by President Clinton's National Homeownership Strategy in which HUD formalized and greatly expanded a long-standing policy goal: the reduction of down payments. It asked "[l]ending institutions, secondary market investors, mortgage insurers, and other members of the partnership [to] work collaboratively to reduce homebuyer down payment requirements."

Also in 1995, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) regulations were revised to be more quantitative and outcome based. Banks were now measured on their use of "innovative and flexible" lending standards, and their performance was compared to market competitors. As pointed out by Fed Chairman Bernanke in 2007: "Further attention to CRA was generated by the surge in bank merger and acquisition activities that followed the enactment of the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994." CRA's stick of denying a merger application was now combined with CRA's carrot of announcing a big CRA commitment to flexible lending standards to help assure merger approval. The result was trillions of dollars in CRA commitments, largely "negotiated" by community advocacy groups....