This one’s important because conservatives have been trying to tell us that the mortgage crisis was caused by the evil gub’mint forcing banks to lend to minorities:

The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents.

The great lie being perpetrated by the right is that the banks - the wonderful, wonderful banks! - didn’t want to lend to untrustworthy minorities. No, they were forced to do so by Big Gub’mint.

False. The banks thought these risky mortgages were a gold mine. And they were - for a while.

Bowing to aggressive lobbying — along with assurances from banks that the troubled mortgages were OK — regulators delayed action for nearly one year. By the time new rules were released late in 2006, the toughest of the proposed provisions were gone and the meltdown was under way.

“These mortgages have been considered more safe and sound for portfolio lenders than many fixed rate mortgages,” David Schneider, home loan president of Washington Mutual, told federal regulators in early 2006. Two years later, WaMu became the largest bank failure in U.S. history.