That however ignores that he took the advice of people like Greenspan, Gramm, Rubin and most of his economic advisers to undo what they called archaic regulations that weren't needed in modern times. This was VERY wrong - they were the root without which this could not have happened. Bill Clinton did actively advocate for both the repeal of Glass-Segal and the Commodity Futures Modernization amendment. These two actions removed a LOT of regulation on the banks and the financial markets respectively - including having NO regulation of swaps and derivatives. Had Clinton, instead of supporting these, said he would veto a budget if these amendments were there - they likely would have been removed.

But, this was made worse under Bush because Cox allowed a change that allowed leverage to go from the 1 to 12 it was to ratios like 1 to 44.

These were the actions that converted what would have been the bursting of the housing bubble with foreclosures causing enormous pain to the full blown financial crisis where many big banks are probably bankrupt and dysfunctional drying up loans to small businesses etc. So, yes - he bears responsibility as does his economic team. They were part of the team that steamrolled Congress to pass these measures. (In both cases, nearly all Senate Democrats voted against the budget to begin with - but then they mostly voted for conference report that included Glass-Segal and allowed the budget containing the CFM to pass on a voice vote. They obviously did not want to filibuster a must pass budget the President wanted. )

The Republicans have claimed that it was the Democrats who pushed the banks to give risky mortgages - nothing could be further from the truth. Though this does not relate to Clinton, but to Democrats, Senate Democrats tried to outlaw the use of things like balloon loans and other risky loans. A bill was introduced in 2000 by Sarbanes, Kerry, Dodd, Durbin and Schumer and was buried by the Republicans in the Banking Committee. It was reintroduced in 2002 and in 2003 - so they tried for three Congresses in a row. Here is a link to the 2000 bill - http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?b... The second two times the bill had 14 and then 15 sponsors - all Democrats. Durbin tried to get the same provisions in an amendment to the bankrutcy bill in 2005 and on at least one other bill. This means there were at lest 5 serious attempts by Democrats and only Democrats to regulate risky loans during the 2000s.

In addition, the 2004 Democratic platform included a plank to deal with credit card and mortgage abuses including outlawing balloon mortgages in most cases. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html... Thanks to DU - here is more information on that - http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu...

Now the Republicans speak of their desire to regulate Freddie and Fannie - ignoring that in addition to the FMs there were private companies aggregating mortgagaes. The House passed a bipartisan bill whose chief sponsor was a Republican which the Senate Democrats accepted. The Senate Republicans backed a bill that would have decreased the size of Freddie and Fannie in addition to regulating, which also had an Santorum amendment that cut affordable housing funds. The Republicans buried the bipartisan bill in committee and never took their bill to the floor of the Senate as FM lobbyists persuaded a group of Republicans not to support it. The fact though is that the FMs accounted for 17% of the foreclosures, their private counterparts for 83%. The Republican bill - described as the stronger bill would actually have increased the more troubled private sector.

In addition, when foreclosures mounted, Senator Kerry was the only person in a meeting of the leadership with Bush who argued for putting money to deal with salvaging mortgages in the 2008 stimulus package - when others said it was a good idea, he and Gordon Smith wrote a provision to do so and it was accepted into the Senate version of the stimulus package with 20 out of 21 votes in the Finance committee - but the Senate version was filibustered and that provision did not end up in the passed bill. Both HRC and Obama called for similar things in their presidential runs.

Here is a summary using a fire as an analogy. Clinton did open fire doors that wise people had said needed to exist (FDR et al) that let the fire spread, but the Bush administration took no actions to close them before the fire started and with the change in leverage they provided inflammatory material. In addition, the spark that set everything off - the foreclosure crisis - might have been kept away had either the predatory loan legislation passed or if action were taken when the fire was smaller (ie when the Democrats called for dealing with the foreclosure crisis.)