Enacting legislation to "help the poor" is always effective PR. It always sounds good during re-election. No lobbyists are needed.

I appreciate your concern for magnitudes. It turns out to be quite difficult to get precise measures of just how active Fannie and Freddie were in the subprime market. I've spent many hours over the last week going over their annual reports and their 10-Ks. I'm working on it.

The point about manufactured homes is to illustrate the role Congress played. It was significant. They leaned on Fannie and Freddie to boost home ownership rates any time they could. The manufactured homes example is illustrative.

I hope I can provide some more important numbers of their wider contribution in the coming weeks.

Do you have any data? Is it just too much trouble for you to get quantitative data?

Russ, do you think this might have something to do with the current situation?

But many on Wall Street did even worse, as Mr. Berman describes it. They continued to trade very complex securities concocted by their most creative bankers even though their risk management systems weren’t able to understand the details of what they owned.

A lot of deals were nonstandard in many ways, “so you really had to go through the entire prospectus and read every single line to pick up all the nuances,” Mr. Berman said. “And that slows down the process when mortgage yields looked very attractive.”

So some trading desks took the most arcane security, made of slices of mortgages, and entered it into the computer if it were a simple bond with a set interest rate and duration. This seemed only like a tiny bit of corner-cutting because the credit-rating agencies declared that some of these securities were triple-A. (20/20 hindsight: not!) But once the mortgage market started to deteriorate, the computers were not able to identify all the parts of the portfolio that might be hurt.