[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.