Sorry charlie, but unfortunately you have forgotten one thing. In order to entice PEOPLE to BUY THE LOANS with which to make a bundled security out of you needed the really low low interest rates to make the payments possible. Without low interest rates there are no buyers, with no buyers the bubble could never have happened in the first place. Thanks for playing common sense economics, there are some consolation prizes waiting for you at the door.I've yet to hear anyone dispute any of the logic or evidence I posted. Only people pronouncing me wrong with no explanation for why what I said that was false.
If you eliminate the FED from the equation altogether these loans would have been slightly less attractive for buyers, but banks would have still be handing them out like candy because they were not liable if people defaulted on them. People would have still been buying up bundled bad mortgages because they would have still had the misleading AAA rating.
So no, you're incorrect. The FED made the problem worse, but they were not the root cause of the problem since the problem would have still existed with or without these low interest rates.
Now if you take the deregulation of the financial services industries that happened in the late 1990s-2004 out of the equasion, then it would not have been possible to bundle these mortgages and give them an AAA rating. If they were not rated as safe investments then the banks would not have been able to sell them off. If banks would not have been able to sell them off, then they would have been responsible if the loans defaulted rather than passing off the risk to investors. If the banks were liable for bad loans they would not have handed out loans to people who couldn't afford them. Without these loans defaulting, the crisis would not have been possible.
Basically, you can point to the fed for making the problem worse. But they were not the ones who allowed banks to hand out loans risk free nor were they responsible for regulating for allowing these loans to be bundled and sold off as safe investments.
Do you know who was responsible for regulating that? No one! We deregulated that market! That's how this whole thing happened and no one noticed. It's also why no one went to jail. When you deregulate these things then Wall St is allowed to regulate themselves so they can pull these scams without committing a crime.
So please tell me, how did deregulating that market work out for us?
Edit: I see Parker already addressed this issue.