Economic blowback: the finanical crisis

I) Of course, the crisis in which mortgage-heavy banks and other lending institutions (e.g., Lehman Brothers, and so on) find themselves stems in huge part by giving loans willy-nilly to people that could not afford the properties -and in turn suffered foreclosures, losing their homes ....
Yet, II) we would be remiss to ignore the financial system's mess as also arising from the [Republican-driven, we should note!] deregulation mania of the 1980s. This crisis is economic blowback for ill-conceived lending practices and ill-conceived regulation "reforms."
Ah, deregulation . . . look at what it has wrought: disaster for the airlines; disaster for banks and other lending institutions.
Here is a good piece of the second factor noted above, namely, David Lightman, "Wall Street crisis is culmination of 28 years of deregulation", September 15, 2008, in McClatchy Newspapers.