It was, the feds cracked down on all the banks forced them to diversify their portfolios based on regulatory metrics and it froze lenders. Banks that couldn’t diversify enough or didn’t have strong enough balance sheets the feds forced mergers and acquisitions.
Banks couldn’t be leverage too much on a single customer, they couldn’t be too heavily loaded in real estate or a single industry and they had to meet reserve guidelines. It paralyzed banks, they had to freeze credit lines, they had zero room to let companies work out their issues so they called loans and had to pass on viable deals.
New loans were few and far between and it crushed the economy. The mortgage bubble started it all but by the time it was over a lot of companies didn’t make it because they had no access to capital.