People lied on their mortgage applications, claiming to have incomes and assets they didn't have, so that they could take out massive loans they could never rep

People lied on their mortgage applications, claiming to have incomes and assets they didn't have, so that they could take out massive loans they could never repay. The loans were structured to have low payments initially and then larger payments later, which the fraudulent actors were ok with because they expected to flip the house before the larger payments were due. That is what caused the mortgage crisis. To pretend that people committing fraud lost out "through no fault of their own" makes no sense, it's entirely their own fault. Legitimate buyers wouldn't be impacted- if a person buys a house to live in it, and pays for instance $3,000 per month, then the market price after purchase doesn't matter. They still live in their house and they still pay $3,000 per month. Maybe you weren't around at that time, but there were a dozen different wildly popular TV shows about people flipping houses, people were buying houses with zero down payments, buying houses they couldn't afford because "real estate always goes up" and advice to "buy now and refinance in 6 months when the price has gone up" and all sorts of other greedy, speculative behavior. Houses in 2007 were the cryptocoins of the day, but with massive leverage by lying on mortgage applications.