A report from the Wall Street Journal. "More than a decade after home loans triggered the worst financial crisis in a generation, the strict lending requirements put in place during its aftermath are starting to erode. Home buyers with low credit scores or high debt levels as well as those lacking traditional employment are finding it easier to get credit."

"Home buyers who don’t have pay stubs because, for instance, they are self-employed, have been gravitating to lenders that will accept bank statements to verify income. At first, these lenders asked applicants to submit years of statements. Now, some require just a few months. Citadel Servicing Corp. offers a mortgage that requires just one month of bank statements."

From Aaron Layman. "During the last 10 years the Fed poured trillions of dollars into the economy to reflate asset prices, and a great deal of that liquidity went into the real estate sector. This a big reason for why we have so few affordable homes, and why many millennials are now priced out of the market as home price inflation has greatly exceeded wage growth."

"Real estate agents generally don’t talk about this market dynamic. The Texas A&M Real Estate Center, funded by real estate licensing dues and renewals, spends a great deal of time writing and researching the intricacies of the Texas economy and housing market fundamentals, yet they miraculously leave the Federal Reserve out of the conversation in their research."

"The center has a rich history, but in recent years the Real Estate Center at A&M has often looked like an extension of the Federal Reserve research, which offers copious amounts of data with little insight. I have an idea about why this is the case. If you scroll down to Page 27 of the Real Estate Center’s history, you will find a note about the 'new era of REC-FED cooperation,' which began back in 2012 with the arrival of one Dr. Luis Torres."

"It makes sense that following the Great Recession, the Fed was looking to use its army of economists to preach the gospel of trickle-down monetary prosperity. The Federal Reserve needed cover for their massive quantitative easing experiment, and what better way to spread the news than to have economists cutting their teeth at the Federal Reserve and then branching out into other firms and agencies to spread the message of economic growth."

"It’s surprising you never hear the Ph.D. economists at A&M’s center mention how the Fed blew a new bubble in Dallas-area home prices with trillions of dollars in new liquidity injected into the markets. You never see charts in Real Estate Center research pieces showing how the Fed’s liquidity dump lit the fire for the Dallas-Fort Worth economic boom following the Great Recession."

"The Fed’s army of economists have a history of really bad forecasting and myopic thinking. In the Federal Reserve’s distorted view, Main Street America has the same access to super cheap capital as GE or Goldman Sachs. This is of course lunacy, but it’s how the Fed operates. The Fed’s flawed economic models and assumptions are not just bad; they are dangerous."

"If you need an example, here’s Exhibit A: 'We believe the effect of the troubles in the subprime sector on the broader housing market will likely be limited, and we do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system.' — Ben Bernanke, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, May 2007."