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Encouraging loans to poor people is a red herring. It isnt getting minorities into houses that caused this problem. They dont have enough money to bring down our financial system no matter how many bad loans they were given. (And that isnt even the case - The laws didnt say the banks had to give loans to minorities with bad credit ratings - It said they couldnt DENY loans to minorities who had EQUAL OR BETTER credit ratings as the non-minorities who were getting loans - Since the mortgage companies didnt deny a mortgage to anybody capable of signing their name that meant lots of minorities got loans - but they were no more undeserving than anyone else)
What caused this problem was the fiasco in the MBS market and the derivatives based on them. The regulators could easily (and soon will) have imposed capital requirements for banks and insurance companies playing in this market. They acted as if the boom could never end and when it did they were caught with too much of this worthless paper. A better regulatory setup would have said "OK buy as much of that crap as you like, but you have to have capital in the bank to back up a decent chunk of it or you are out of compliance". That could have put the brakes on the whole mess long before it got to where it did.
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