The Credit Crisis Formed out of a Need to Gain Market Share

At least it seems that way according to findings by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

In early 2004, Freddie's executive team was engaged in a heated debate over whether to start acquiring "stated income, stated assets" mortgages. And in April of that year, David Andrukonis, the head of risk management, wrote to his colleagues, "This is not an affordable product, as I understand it, but a product necessary to recapture [market] share. . . . In 1990 we called this product 'dangerous' and eliminated it from the marketplace." Freddie went ahead anyway.

Yup these 'dangerous' products were bought to the tune of $1.6 trillion and they were the multiplier effect that blew the entire thing sky high. They may not have caused the crisis but they certainly played a part in making it go from problems in one or two industries to encompass to threaten the entire world economy.