The Washington Post
(Editor’s note: Opinion pieces are published for discussions purposes only.)
We are constantly learning new stuff about the housing bubble — and some of the new stuff contradicts the old. This is obviously important, because the bubble led to the 2008-2009 financial crisis and Great Recession. What we don’t understand may one day come back to bite us.
There’s a standard and widely shared explanation of what caused the bubble. The villains were greed, dishonesty and (at times) criminality, the story goes. Wall Street, through a maze of mortgage brokers and securitizations, channeled too much money into home buying and building. Credit standards fell. Loan applications often overstated incomes or lacked proper documentation of creditworthiness (so-called no-doc loans).
