While politicians, talking heads, and bloggers blab about the causes of the mortgage crisis, Stan Liebowitz of the University of Texas lays out why they’re all dead wrong in today’s Wall Street Journal.

In much of the discussion about the collapse of the U.S. housing market, commentators have assumed that the massive run-up in property prices that preceded the subprime-mortgage meltdown were simply the result of a speculative frenzy that became a full-fledged market bubble.