When Wall Street realized how much money was to be made by making bad loans, packaging them with good loans and reselling them as derivatives, THAT is when things got out of hand. Every shady loan company was filling their books with things like “liar's loans” and selling them to investment banks who didn't care. The rating agencies who are supposed to investigate these loans just wrote them off as good without doing their job to investigate if they were bogus or not.

And then there's the deregulation, Clinton expanded the CRA, Bush did too (part of his whole “compassionate conservative” shtick). Clinton signed Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act into law (named for it's 3 REPUBLICAN authors), which repealed the old Glass-Steagle Act, a depression era regulation which kept investment banks, rating agencies and other financial institutions separate. Important, because a vertical monopoly (owning every step in an economic process) gives these institutions a great reason to run fast and loose (read: fraud) with money they've been entrusted with. Hell, this is one of the things that lead to the crash in '29, which preceded the Great Depression.

My rage is bipartisan. You think we'd have learned something from our history.