risk eliminated from the sub-prime market
At the top end were Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, where quite a lot of the bad paper ended up with the implication that the government would back it up if anything went wrong.
At the bottom of a lot of banking problems is the assumption by greedy speculators that Uncle Sam will bail them out. It was the same for the Savings and Loan crisis, where the government "deregulated" the industry, but kept the insurance and safeguards that would prevent anyone from losing money on crappy deals.