Depends on when you start the credit bubble off :)

Obviously price increase for anything will cause problems if housing cost are going up at a rapid rate but certainly the decade of long build up played a role in eventually eroding consumer savings well before the final pop.

If you look at the housing bubble correctly in my opinion is something thats been building since the 1980's with a steady decline in the loan requirements and steadily increasing values one would then say that the housing bubble popped itself when prices started increasing to rapidly. Things simple got out of hand. With this viewpoint the housing bubble was already popping itself by 2003-2004 when it went insane.

Two external factors are involved at this point the initially low interest rates really driving the bubble then increasing interest rates and rising oil prices and finally the insanity of the bubble itself by 2005.

I'd argue that the final rate of increase in prices was the biggest driving force since it leapt home prices well beyond wages its even worse then the loans themselves. If prices had not increased so rapidly the availability of exotic loans would not have had as big of a impact. The reason is far fewer people would have sought them to purchase a home.

Any ponzi scheme carries the seeds of its own destruction intrinsically no external factors are required given this its interesting that the government effectively drove the housing ponzi scheme to a fast collapse with its actions in concert with rising oil prices.

If you think about it if oil prices had really increased first and the government had done nothing to drive the housing bubble so fast it burst then oil prices would have risen and housing would have cooled off and probably slowly deflated we would have never got this huge crisis we have now.

Now for the tinfoil hat crowd the real driver i.e low interest rates was after 9/11 and as the Iraqi war started up. So if there was a real decision to crash the decades long housing bubble by brute force then it happened then. Before oil prices went up but at the start of the US war for Iraqi oil.

So without intervention history would have been different the housing bubble would not have gone so high before it popped and rising oil prices would have resulted in a less vicious pop and no crisis.

Now I'm not suggesting that all of this was planned outside of interest rate changes the rest could readily have been simply making the best of the situation (if your a banker)
However even before I became aware of peak oil it was obvious that growth in China and India would eventually mean the US got a lot less of the world resources. I'd say this was blatantly obvious to everyone. And this rather obvious point is what lead me to look at resources and eventually find out about peak oil. Next I'd say that a peak by 2030 at the latest was probably broadly accepted even in the highest circles if not sooner so its also obvious using this that the US would be squeezed hard by 2010-2020 at the latest as global growth simply squeezed the pig (US) ever more.

Bottom line is the US was going to hit the wall within 20 years with the most generous estimates and this could be seen as early as 2000 esp if you included our financial condition even then.

You really don't need much of a tinfoil hat to recognize that we where in sight of the end of the oil driven growth economy at least for the US. I guess at this point you really only have two choices either too collapse it slowly and live with the situation or rev it up till everyone hits the wall and try to grab the pieces before it falls apart. One has to guess that if this was the thinking then the real game was how do you make China fall ?
A slow collapse would simply have resulted in China bolstering its internal economy early on and not becoming so addicted to exports. If you look at the history we also really suckered in the Chinese big time after 2000.

http://www.marktaw.com/culture_and_media/TheUSTradeDeficit.html

But the decisions seem to reach even farther back in time. The roots of both the housing bubble and the trade deficit extend back into the 1980's.

The end result for the US seems to be no matter how you look at things that the peak in US production which was obvious by the 1980's seems to have driven most of the long term decisions and trends that where finally it seems forced to blow up now. Also one might guess looking at Alaskan production that by the mid 1990's or so that it was obvious that Alaska was not going to save our internal oil production. And last but not least given falling domestic oil production and growth in China with our without the active participation of the US in playing the export game the US would have been marginalized.

So although the exact timing of various things is not clear I'd say the big picture concerns and early decisions where made back in the 1980's and repeatedly reaffirmed and made from then on out. In fact following the fate of oil and money in the US back in time. Nixon left the Gold standard in 1971 US oil production peaked in 1970.

Striking coincide is it not ?

A massively unregulated and overleveraged financial market allowed for hyperinflation of commodities prices over and above real demand as well as pumping up of demand by priming credit markets for houses/credit cards.

http://www.aspousa.org/index.php/2009/03/the-role-of-speculation-in-the-...

So this was a positive circle. Easy credit to consumers was offloaded as CDOs, etc. squared and cubed to the nth degree and proceeds reinvested in anything available at the moment, gold, dollars, oil, etc. Now if markets had been regulated and no offshore derivative stuff then a rational price for houses, commodities could have been achieved. Make originating banks keep loans on their books and speculators take delivery of commodities and then you would have seen no bubble and no bust, just a slow growth cycle according to population growth until real geological PO squeezed it dry.

1. Oil prices rise sharply (The sharpest rise percent-wise was actually around the '03-'04 time frame.)

Percent increases aren't what matter. A change from $100/mo to $200/mo is much easier to fit into the family budget than a change from $300/mo to $500/mo, even though the former is a larger percentage.

Moreover, saying "oil prices have been rising for 5 (or 10) years" doesn't have any predictive power. That's such a long period that a recession is statistically likely to occur during that period, so it's very difficult to draw a causal relation. With such a long span of time, there's a large risk of coincidental or post hoc reasoning. The terrorist attacks in London came after several years of rising oil prices, but that gives no indication of a causal relation.

If a trend continues for 5-10 years, lots of stuff will happen during that time, but that doesn't mean the trend caused any of it.