Just for the record, I think it's kind of fascinating that a subsection of the (mostly conservative) population conceives of this instead as 'the percentage of loans given to stupid people must have been substantially higher than in previous decades.' In other words, where I tend to conceive of the problem in the regulations as making *kinds of loans* legal and *kinds of investing* legal (and especially in having the same people in charge of both), they conceive of the problem being in the *kinds of people* being offered the loans. Specifically, if they are trying to sound smart about it, rather than just saying that people shouldn't have taken loans they couldn't afford (without looking at any other factors about why people may have taken such loans), they pin it on the CRA, although almost all reputable experts disagree that this had anything to do with the problem.