you and dr paul make a good point about the government encouraging F&F to be too big...the bush administration (and congress) leaned on F&F to issue half a trillion dollars of mortgage loans to low income families AFTER US home ownership had reached record levels, and then fannie and freddie were used to buy up bad loans from banks...the government screwed up big time....despite his common sense talk, i am doubtful that the subprime crisis would have been avoided under ron paul if he were president...correct me if i am wrong, but dr paul is anti-regulation and the private banks caused most of the problems leading up to the subprime crisis...they screwed up even bigger time

HOWEVER the too-big-to-fail argument was used to justify the bail out of the private non-regulated banks too, and those bum mortgage loans and mortgage backed securities would have been issued even if fannie and freddie never existed, so the bubble and bailout would have happened anyway, although it might have cost less if the risk was spread around to smaller banks that weren't too big to fail...their failure is an additional cost to americans who had business with them on top of the taxpayers money used for the bailouts so it's a wash on a per capita basis

the federal gov't demonstrated it's willingness to 'intervene' in the financial markets when george bush's daddy threw $120 billion at the savings and loan crisis...perhaps that contributed to the failure of the banks' self-interest to self-regulate their affairs