… is from page 242 of Charles Calomiris’s and Stephen Haber’s important 2014 book, Fragile By Design (footnote deleted):
If the mortgage-underwriting standards in effect at Fannie and Freddie circa 2003 had remained in place, nothing on the magnitude of the subprime crisis would have occurred.
DBx: Yep. And as Calomiris and Haber show in this book, mortgage-underwriting standards were pushed lower by officials in the U.S. government.