Many factors contributed to the Great Recession of 2008, but its root cause was simple: In a two-decade-long bipartisan campaign to expand homeownership, especially among minority and lower-income communities, federal authorities cajoled, threatened and ultimately mandated that mortgage institutions put aside traditional, common-sense lending standards. A real estate bubble predictably followed as adjustable-rate mortgages, subprime loans requiring little or no down payment, and other lend-at-all-costs incentives combined with corporate greed to encourage an irrational exuberance about the value of real estate. Americans borrowed trillions of dollars to buy millions of homes at unjustifiably high prices, using the overvalued homes themselves as collateral, even as commercial banks packaged millions of these shaky mortgages into securities for investors looking for quick, easy profits. And standing behind it all stood government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, implicitly guaranteeing everybody that nobody would lose their shirts. The whole house of cards collapsed when people couldn’t afford their mortgage payments. A flood of foreclosures followed, rendering all those subprime mortgage-backed securities worthless, causing panic on Wall Street and plunging the nation into a recession. Fannie and Freddie, having lost hundreds of billions of dollars to the folly of propping up the subprime mortgage market, are now under government conservatorship and bound by new, stringent lending standards. But one badly burned hand of government seems unaware that the other is thrusting itself right back into the fire. In a recent article for the American, housing expert Peter Wallison points out that the Federal Housing Administration is picking up where Fannie and Freddie left off by pursuing many of the same practices that led to the 2008 crisis.