Flutterby™! : Anatomy of a Train Wreck

I have been openly hostile to the notion that the 30 year old CRA played a pivotal role in the current financial meltdown, and have rolled my eyes a bit when looking at the die hard libertarian "government intervention caused this mess" calls while revelations are coming out about the extensive lobbying to allow the various brokerages and banks to use lower reserves while dabbling about with the hugely leveraged gambling.

However, I haven't read a breakdown yet of the various legal and cultural steps that lead to the current disaster that made sense. Plenty that didn't.

In the comments to Arnold Kling: My Fantasty Testimony there was a link to Independent Policy Report: Anatomy of a Train Wreck: Causes of the Mortgage Meltdown by Stan J. Leibowitz, which seems to be doing a pretty good job of laying out the political influences that led to the desires to create these wacky mortgage backed securities, why the rating agencies were happy to let the bad numbers through, how political climate impacted the cherry picking of studies that god fed back into the models of the rating agencies, and so forth.

[Edit: No endorsement of Arnold Kling is implied, he's been spectacularly wrong before]