A look back: what we now know about the causes of the US mortgage crisis

This article reviews what we know about the causes of the US mortgage crisis, almost a decade after the crisis began. The paper summarizes the key forces that led to the crisis or, in some cases, to the development of a fundamentally fragile mortgage market, whose vulnerability helped enable the crisis. While some factors, such as federal policies pre-empting state consumer protection laws, were near-term spurs to higher levels of subprime lending, others - such as the migration of lending activity from savings and loans to less regulated mortgage companies - led to the development of a mortgage market that was more risk-loving, less regulated, and more prone to cataclysmic failure.