Did Uncle Sam Cause the Housing Bubble?

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Matt Steinglass is arguing with his “Hayek-inflected” colleague W.W. about the origins and causes of the housing bubble. Roughly speaking, the two sides take the following positions:

(a) Federal government policies played a strong role in promoting the housing bubble.

(b) No, it was primarily the excesses of the private sector that powered the housing bubble.

Just to be clear: by position (a) I don’t mean the kind of childish Fox News dimwittery that blames everything on the CRA and Fannie Mae. I mean the grown-up critique that more generally blames federal encouragement of homeownership, Fed monetary policy, federal tax policy, and various kinds of federal regulation of the financial industry. What’s interesting here is that these two positions can collapse into each other pretty quickly. Let’s rephrase them like this:

(a) Government regulations encouraged the private sector to lever up and make lots of bad loans in the housing sector.

(b) The financial industry used its enormous influence to lobby for deregulatory legislation, which allowed the private sector to lever up and make lots of bad loans in the housing sector.

Both of these statements are more or less accurate. And of course, deregulation is merely shorthand for a different set of regulations and policies, so our two positions can collapse even further if we like:

(a) Changes in government policy encouraged home buyers to borrow too much and encouraged the financial industry to lever up and make too many bad loans.

(b) Changes in government policy encouraged home buyers to borrow too much and encouraged the financial industry to lever up and make too many bad loans.

The difference here becomes more one of inflection than anything else. If the federal government created policies that allowed the financial sector to behave recklessly, whose fault was this? The government qua government? Or was it a specific and remediable failure of government caused by its capture by the financial industry? There’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter: government policy is government policy, and if federal regulations were too lax, that means the government was at fault.

But in another sense, it makes all the difference in the world. If we use government in its traditional civics class sense, where policy changes are driven by politicians of different parties responding to different swathes of public opinion, that leads us to one set of possible fixes. But if we use government in the sense of a political institution that primarily responds to lobbying by the rich and powerful — which is my preferred sense — that leads us to quite a different set of possible fixes. In both cases, it’s quite accurate to say that “the government” played a big role in the problem, but they could hardly be more different in the kinds of solutions they suggest. The problem, then, is that when someone says this you have to listen more to the accent in which they talk than to the words themselves, and that can be pretty tricky. Caveat emptor.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate