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> what this ever-popular narrative misses out

Straw man. Left commenters know perfectly well about the roles of Fannie and Freddy. The left critique is not just greedy banks. It's also government collision in pumping property values, as well as interest and fees banks make, via Fanny and Freddy.

If your opinion is that using government policy to enrich property owners and banks is socialist, then you have a very unorthodox view of socialism.

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I got a mortgage. I had to sign a vast pile of paperwork. There was one person in the room who had done it before, and it wasn't me.

The idea that this was all about devious consumers taking advantage of poor innocent banks is laughable.

Seriously.

The narrative that the banks had no incentive to be intelligent about who they lent money to is absolutely true because good credit bad credit no credit, the banks didn't care - the bank's money was backed by the Feds, and that was it. The banks got their cut, and made off like bandits. They knew what was going on.

In many cases it wasn’t backed at all, they then bundled those garbage loans up with backed ones and sold them as solid investments out the door as fast as possible. It was fraud, plain and simple.

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