I agree, the article is highly misleading because it leaves this out and tries to take the lenders off the hook. >Nobody was predicting a Great Recession. But

I agree, the article is highly misleading because it leaves this out and tries to take the lenders off the hook. >Nobody was predicting a Great Recession. But Econ 101 says there will always be a recession at some point. Once prices started skyrocketing far above the historically-sustainable levels, the lenders knew they were going to crash at some point, and so they should have cut back on lending. They didn't because they had used securitization to lay their risk off on suckers around the world. And that in turn made the recession far worse than it would have been otherwise.