Here's the evidence I remember, so this is primary information, no citation needed: I used to work for the Federal Reserve Bank. Every fiscal quarter we'd meet

Here's the evidence I remember, so this is primary information, no citation needed: I used to work for the Federal Reserve Bank. Every fiscal quarter we'd meet with the chair where he would give us the inside straight talk about policy and governance. In 2006 during one of these conferences, the chair mentioned (paraphrasing) "We continue to be very concerned about the rise in subprime mortgages as a percentage of the mortgage industry in general but we have no way from inside the fed to change this trend. We're currently working very hard to figure out some kind of policy measures we can implement to ameliorate this." In 2006 I had no clue about how dangerous this was but as a mere software engineer, I remember distinctly lifting my chin from my screen to mark this utterance, sadly in retrospect, only to wonder what I personally should be doing to help.