"There could not have been a housing bubble without Fannie and Freddie, the FHA, and the protected-by-regulation class of bond ratings agencies." I beg to diff

"There could not have been a housing bubble without Fannie and Freddie, the FHA, and the protected-by-regulation class of bond ratings agencies." I beg to differ. You could have pulled the full cost of every defaulted mortgage out of the bottom line of a single big-5 investment bank and not even bankrupted it. But we had all these crazy hyper-leveraged instruments that turned a 50 billion dollar problem into a 5 trillion dollar problem. The issue wasn't the mortgages, it was the leverage and gambling.