But it was Freddie and Fannie's policies that were the foundation for the rest of the failure. The predatory lending practices, the sub-prime lending market, the housing bubble, the over rated securities, etc almost all hinged or were created in one way or another on Freddie and Fannie. The sub-prime market, bad securities, etc would not have existed to anything remotely resembling the extent they did if not for them. Certainly there were other problems, however, they were not significant enough without the failures set in motion by Fannie and Freddie practices and policies to cause such a widespread financial failure.
There are certainly other significant factors such as the $10-13 trillion that has flowed off-shore to avoid our confiscatory corporate tax structures and tax compliance costs. It is absolutely obscene that our multi-layered federal and state tax systems have created a situation wherein it is less expensive for a company to go to a foreign country, build the infrastructure for a factory, build the factory, buy the raw materials overseas, send over management teams, hire local labor, train local labor, build the product, pay the huge shipping costs to send the product back to the US, pay tarriffs, pay distribution costs and then jack up the price to cover all that with the resulting lesser sales volume and still find that is a more profitable proposition than making the same product in Detroit. If those trillions were still here working in our national economy directly the $700 billion "bail out" would not have only been unnecessary but insignificant.
Now having said all that, given the complexity of the financial markets and that the analyses of what happened (which will be performed by people far more knowledgeable than me about these matters) there is always a possibility that I am wrong about most or all of the above
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