Not what happened. The financial crash in 2008 was effectively DEI-gone-wrong in the housing market, not bailing out middle class boomers. Let me explain.
In the 1980s and 1990s, mortgage approval rates and home ownership rates amongst blacks were significantly lower than amongst whites, and trending downward relatively. Under Clinton, they developed a plan to begin incentivizing banks to offer mortages more easily and numerously to "lower income households", aka blacks.
The vehicle they used to achieve this was the sub-prime mortgage. A sub-prime mortgage is effectively a higher interest mortgage for people who typically would not qualify for a regular mortgage. They don't qualify because the default and foreclosure rate is predicted to be too high amongst this class of people, and therefore banks would lose money offering these mortgages to people with low credit scores and low earnings (blacks). The sub-prime mortgage attempts to mitigate this by increasing the interest rate on those who don't default in order to compensate for the losses from those who do.
You can see the problem already: increasing the interest rate thus further increases the number of people who default, then you need to increase interest rates further to compensate for that. This becomes a runaway problem. That is why sub-prime mortgages were historically relatively rare and banks were picky about handing them out.
Under this new DEI directive, banks begin handing out sub-prime mortgages at much higher rates to predominantly black families as a kind of housing affirmative-action. This is oversimplifying, but it's close enough.
These mortgages were packaged into massive investment assets, which other banks like Lehmann Brothers invested into. These assets would be mixed in with other assets and retraded once again, until eventually they just became part of broader asset packages inside large portfolios.
Worse yet, and perhaps the key point: banks and investors were borrowing on leverage to purchase these asset packages.
Once the defaults and foreclosures inevitably stacked up over time, the value of holding these mortgages crashed, and along with it any asset package containing them. Any portfolio which was overly burdened by them consummately crashed, and once again, key point: if borrowing on leverage, the investor was margin called. Many banks and investors did not have the capital to answer the margin, leading to the market crash and completely destruction of these banks and investment firms; both the investors who were margin called, and the loaners who couldn't reclaim their loans by margin calling.
The homes of White boomers were not part of this asset class. They did not benefit or use sub-prime mortgages. They did not invest in subprime mortgages. They have basically nothing to do with this at all in fact.
Boomers paid off their houses despite historically high interest rates. The % of real median wages boomers paid into mortgage payments is comparable to what people pay today, despite housing prices increasing. Different topic for a different day.
Know-nothing economic populism that attempts to blame every problem on some phantom phenomena of boomers that either doesn't exist or is barely even tangentially related to the concern at hand is a dead end, and there is no excuse to do this in the age of LLMs. Maybe instead start by caring about what's actually true instead, that is always at least a reliable starting point.
The government literally did buy every Boomer a house. Boomers would've all lost their houses during Covid or the Great Recession if the "free market" had been allowed to play out. Instead the govt stole 40 TRILLION DOLLARS from the future and spent it propping up Boomers' home equity. Gen Z will still be paying off the houses the govt bought the Boomers when they're 90.