The Community Reinvestment Act did not cause the US housing bubble

Evidence

With regard to the CRA, the largest players in the subprime market were private-sector firms that were not subject to CRA stipulated rules and regulations. Therefore, for the story to work, the bulk of the subprime action had to happen in the GSEs, but as we shall see, it did not. Furthermore, in institutions subject to the CRA, not all loans fell under the CRA guidelines; so the proportion of loans affected were quite small. Then the timing seems a little off, since the CRA came into effect in 1977, but the housing boom dates from much later. It has become commonplace to point out that housing bubbles happened in many countries in the first decade of the millennium; but none of those other countries had any legislation similar to the CRA. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 883

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to broader post-2008 blame-shifting narratives challenging conservative causal accounts of the crisis. — connects to: Fannie and Freddie did not cause the subprime lending explosion — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 878; The housing bubble traces to private securitization, not government GSE lending — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 888; Cheap credit migrated from the dot-com bubble to the housing bubble — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media: How Wall Street…, 83

Broader Connections

• The housing bubble traces to private securitization, not government GSE lending #corroborates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 888
• Cheap credit migrated from the dot-com bubble to the housing bubble #corroborates (0.80) — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 83