Mortgage meltdown

" Before the mess in the financial markets transmogrified into a monster, Greenspan might have intervened. Under a law that Congress passed in the early 1990s, the Federal Reserve had the power to oversee banks like Citigroup and HSBC that were writing the subprime loans. But Greenspan rebuffed appeals to act, saying it would be a “huge effort’’ and might have undermined “the desired availability of subprime credits,’’ as recounted in Alyssa Katz’s “Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us.’’ "