My favorite: NINJA loans. (No Income, No Job, No assets).

Plenty of fraud by banks and investment houses though, large and small. The Community Reinvestment Act wasn't great, was a problem, but if anything it was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

The real problem: Corporate officers are no longer held criminally liable for corporate malfeasance. The haven't been since the Enron debacle which tanked not just Enron but the accounting firm Arthur Anderson which led to tens of thousands of job losses.

Matt Taibbi wrote a great book about this. "The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap".

Highly recommended.