Mortgage crisis

One of the main reasons that the mortgage fiasco was so big is that it was allowed to develop even though many people warned that there were serious problems. Every time someone or some agency challenged the easy access to a home mortgage they were shot down by accusing them of not wanting poor people to participate in the American Dream of home ownership. The biggest advocates for the loose requirements for home loans were liberals who wanted to help the poor. One of these was Barney Frank, who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, the congressional committee whose job is to oversee the mortgage business. For more than ten years Frank defended mortgage giant Fanny Mae against attacks by promising to make it easier for low income people to get loans.
One group that regularly investigated Fanny Mae was the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO). Now I would be willing to cut Barney some slack during the early years as this problem developed but at some point he had to know that things were not right. Yet in late 2010, two years after the whole thing blew up, he was asked why he always defended Fanny Mae and he said that he thought the problem was just an adversarial relationship between the regulators at OFHEO and Fanny. This is a very revealing statement as most people would expect there to be or would demand that there be tension between the regulators and the regulated. Frank had been in bed with Fanny for so many years he could not break away even after they were proven to be corrupted.
Lest we just want to blame our elected officials be advised that Frank easily won re-election after the scandal was made public and he is now serving his 31st year in congress.
The people who have been most hurt by the collapse of the housing market were the very poor people that Frank set out to help. This same result has happened over and over since the start of the Great Society which was supposed to help the poor but has time after time hurt more than it helped. This has not deterred liberals from continuing to propose government programs that will help (?) the poor. One more example of the unintended consequence of good intentions.