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30 RE-EXAMINING SUBPRIME'S LEGACY New research is questioning the belief that subprime lending was the major culprit in the housing boom during the early 2000s. Furthermore, researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York are also emphasizing that subprime loans were also not necessarily at higher risk for fraud. is "new narrative" is important for policymakers hoping to stave off a similar future housing boom-and-bust, as they may not need to be concentrating on subprime borrowers as much as previously thought. "Our findings run counter to the traditional narrative of the 2000s housing boom: namely, that the growth in subprime home purchases led to the growth in house prices too," said James Conklin, W. Scott Frame, Kristopher Gerardi, and Haoyang Liu, in a post on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Liberty Street Economics blog, entitled "Did Subprime Borrowers Drive the Housing Boom?" e blog argues that evidence suggests that subprime lending may not have caused the housing price boom, and that the increase in subprime lending and the elevation in home prices did not occur in the same places. Home prices grew most dramatically in the West, the Northeast, and Florida. Subprime lending was most prevalent in the Midwest and the Ohio River Valley. ere is actually a "negative correlation between the growth in house prices and the increase in subprime share of home purchase mortgages at the county level over this period," the researchers wrote. One, then, could not have directly caused the other on a large scale, they state. Instead, rising prices likely "priced out" many subprime borrowers in many markets. Another possible misperception addressed by the New York Fed research is whether subprime loans were more likely to be fraudulent. e research shows that appraisal fraud was not typical of subprime loans. Incidences of inflated appraisals did not increase over time during the housing boom years. ey also were not concentrated in areas with a high prevalence of subprime loans, and in areas that experienced high price growth, inflated appraisals were less prevalent among subprime borrowers than among prime borrowers.