Mortgages in America, a people's History
A breif history of subprime mortgage.
But any industry this big was soon irresistible to speculators. In several waves of deregulation, the industry set out to fix something that wasn't broken and managed to slip outside the bounds of government banking supervision. In each of these cycles, free-marketers promised greater efficiency and more plentiful credit, if government regulators would just get out of the way. In each episode, however, the result has instead been increased speculation followed by huge losses and costs to the public.