You’re missing the point — even though it was targeted to one segment of the market it changed all of it.
That’s not a new claim and it has always failed to explain the fact that the shadow banks had been looking for a large market that would yield a higher interest rate than what they were able to get from bonds.
Subprime lending offered high yields but it had been confined to small hard money loans by the likes of Household Finance and Aames Home Loans. No one had figured out how to cultivate a large subprime market. After Greenspan cratered interest rates in the wake of 9-11 the hunt for yield became more urgent. One of the Wall Street firms had been toying with subprime real estate loans in the 90s but had dropped the idea. After 2000 other investment banks picked up the ball and ran with it- mortgage loans are a big enough market to absorb the kind of money that they were looking to invest and they did exactly that in a huge way.
You can find all of this written about in ‘Chain of Blame’ ‘Fools Gold’ and other books by people in the industry who watched this all develop. Most of these firms weren’t even making mortgage loans before they decided to enter the market in the early 2000s. No one forced them to do this. They wanted a market where they could write high yield paper and they went out and consciously developed it. They didn’t care about the CRA. At most the CRA provided them with a few extra clients but they were developing this market no matter what anyone else was doing, including the gov’t.