Not really the point I want to make, but Reagan most certainly did not inherit a bigger disaster than the current one. Pretty much everyone agrees that the calamity of 08-09 was the worst since the Depression.

There's an interesting caveat to the mortgage crisis that you don't hear brought up too much, and it transcends party. In the early 2000s Greenspan gave a policy speech where he basically vowed that the US wasn't going to raise interest rates any time soon (for who knows what reason). At the same time, we were seeing the leading edge of a booming economy in China, India and the Mid-East. As it isn't very lucrative to invest cash in the stock markets of those countries, and investing in Treasuries (the most normal safe bet for large investments) wasn't going to pay anything, the largest amount of capital started flowing into housing, which was largely unregulated and had new found financial products that seemed to be cash cows. As wealth begets wealth the capital kept on coming, until you know, everyone realized that in fact that 1200 sq ft house in the burbs isn't really worth $300,000 and the house of cards collapsed.

Except for Glass-Steagall, I'm not sure what would have stopped this. Maybe not even G-S, because these were new financial products and therefore no regulations had been written yet. The thing that drives me crazy is not that this happened, but that we don't seem to have learned our lesson. No one is even entertaining the idea of re-instituting G-S. The finance industry has grown too big in the last 30 years, and they have both parties over a barrel.