If I may, Mr. Chairman, I believe everything the member reported is roughly correct, except the history is longer. If you go back to the Community Reinvestment Act in the United States, we have a much longer history going back to the beginning of the 1990s, and even earlier in different incarnations, where Congress and legislators pushed mortgage lenders to put money back into low-income communities specifically because they thought banks weren't lending as much as they should to people near the edge of creditworthiness. The pressure emerged from Congress, from the House financial services committee in particular, and also from the White House, and in 1998 President Clinton pushed hard on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to broaden their lending activities. And what Franklin Raines said at the time was that too many homeowners were just a notch below creditworthiness and they wanted to reach out to them with our lending programs.
And guess what? He was right, they were just a notch below creditworthiness, but that we didn't know for sure until very recently.
The program, yes, it was broadly expanded by President Bush, who carried on with the mandate of extending home ownership to low-income communities. Lots of indicators show what you saw: ownership at the bottom end of the price range, at the entry-level price range, boost up relative to other income ranges over this particular period, and you saw debt accumulation among those households build up at an unusual rate in response to the incentives created by the mortgage lenders.