IT has become part of the accepted history of our time: The bursting of the housing bubble was the primary cause of a financial crisis, a sharp recession and prolonged slow growth. The story makes intuitive sense, since the economic crisis included a collapse in the prices of housing and related securities. The movie “The Big Short,” which is based on a book by Michael Lewis, takes this cause-and-effect relationship as a given.

But there is an alternative story. In recent months, Senator Ted Cruz has become the most prominent politician to give voice to the theory that the Federal Reserve caused the crisis by tightening monetary policy in 2008. While Mr. Cruz (who is an old friend of one of the authors of this article) has been criticized for making this claim, he shouldn’t back down. He’s right, and our understanding of the great recession needs to be revised.

What the housing-centric view underemphasizes is that the housing bust started in early 2006, more than two years before the economic crisis. In 2006 and 2007, construction employment fell, but overall employment continued to grow, as did the economy generally. Money and labor merely shifted from housing to other sectors of the economy.

This housing decline caused financial stress by sowing uncertainty about the value of bonds backed by subprime mortgages. These bonds served as collateral for institutional investors who parked their money overnight with financial firms on Wall Street in the “shadow banking” system. As their concerns about the bonds grew, investors began to pull money out of this system.