[barry-cotter]

Extremely debatable. Better regulation would have prevented the housing crash but the regulation Americans got (with bipartsian support!) had the effect of making borrowing to buy a house ever easier, thus inflating prices, leading to a crash when it became obvious there were no greater fools left.

[catweasel]

Which specific pieces of regulation made borrowing easier? An interesting wiki on the subject is the GFC timeline- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_crisis_impact_timeline

There's mention there of a political goal ... "of increasing minority home owners by at least 5.5 million by 2010 through billions of dollars in tax credits" ... which is not the same as regulation.

The timeline does attribute removal of regulation for the financial sector .. and also the exclusion from regulation for credit default swaps, which is pretty much the reason Bear Sterns, AIG, Lehman Bros et all went under. They stuffed themselves to the gills with toxic debt, which is fine while everything is going swimmingly, but when the housing bubble bursts it becomes more than just a burst bubble... which is all it would have been if the finance sector had been properly regulated.

[jswinghammer]

The Community Reinvestment Act encouraged banks to make risky loans and if banks didn't make such loans the government would start snooping around in their business. The understanding has always been that the government would bail out massive losses in these loans. Some of the deregulation made things easier for this to happen but the recession would have been regardless of these factors. Job growth over the last ten years has been almost entirely focused in housing and related industries.

[catweasel]

An act which may encourage banks to lend is not regulation. The belief that gov't would bail out the big players does not indicate over regulation, or even appropriate regulation. Quite simply it was the regulation exemptions that were provided which made this thing far worse than it could have been.. and far more widespread. The idea that large financial institutions would conduct themselves responsibly without regulation, and not give way to greed, is complete rubbish and has been proven so, even the most conservative on capitol hill admit that these days.

[catweasel]

This juvenile practise of downvoting simply because one disagrees does not change the fact that legislation != regulation, in fact one can legislate to remove regulation. And btw, the Community Reinvestment Act was introduced in 1977, I doubt it played a major influence in the GFC of 2008. In 2000 regulation was removed for credit default swaps, Lehman, AIG, Bear-Sterns,FM & FM and others all went under due to overload of toxic credit default swaps. Proper regulation could have avoided that... now we have the undesired result of Government owning some of these failed creatures.. which is even worse than government regulations.

[Estragon]

Yeah, it wasn't lack of regulation, exactly. It was corruption.