In fact, this was not just "allowed" by the government, but mandated: when banks were just looking at creditworthiness, activists cried "foul", demanding that they be made to issue loans to minorities more often - even when they didn't qualify properly. So, of course they were left with loans they couldn't afford, giving them worse credit ratings and leaving banks holding bad loans as well.

The sad thing is, there still seems to be no political will to fix or even acknowledge that mistake yet: they'd rather just throw vast amounts of money away propping the mistake up so they can carry on a bit longer. Like the ultra-expensive short term loans all over the UK, they rarely if ever make things better in the long term - just delay problems a bit, while they grow faster than ever before.