It’s named after three Republicans. Admittedly, Clinton signed it, but traditionally its the GOP (and Libertarians) that are clamoring for de-regulation. Conservatives like to blame affordable housing policies, conveniently forgetting that sub-prime mortgages are not new, they’ve been around for decades, but banks avoided them because they are risky. It’s only when they found they could shuffle that risk into derivatives and trick other banks into buying them that suddenly sub-prime mortgages took off (I have a friend who bought a house in 2002, and the bank pushed hard for him to get a sub-prime mortgage when he qualified for a less risky loan, he resisted and still has his house.)
[edit: image search for “sub-prime mortgages” and “graph”, you’ll see that sub-primes didn’t skyrocket immediately following the bill you cited, but do increase exponentially after Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and after the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which both parties can share the blame on.]
