“But undoing this would have been political suicide at that point.”
Bush didn’t just “not undo” CRA he *expanded.* Nothing in CRA ever told low-income would-be homeowners they could have “as nice a home as anybody else,” and nothing in CRA ever pressed lenders to use creative financing to lend people many times more than what their actual incomes qualified them to borrow.
And this entire discussion overlooks the fact that CRA had no real impact on loans to homebuyers in the affluent areas that saw the greatest rises during the bubble and are now seeing the greatest drops.
