An illicit video taken on a mobile phone of President Bush giving his own homespun version of why the US housing market has crashed has caused a furore in Washington.

The footage, shot covertly after Mr Bush had asked for official cameras to be switched off, shows the US President explaining: Wall Street got drunk.

“There’s no question about it. Wall Street got drunk,” Bush said at a private event in Houston on Friday. “It got drunk and now it’s got a hangover. The question is, how long will it sober up and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments?”

Bush’s comments were recorded secretly by a guest at the event and posted to the YouTube Internet site.

He was in Houston to raise money for Republican congressional candidate Pete Olson, who is challenging Nick Lampson, the incumbent Democratic Representative.

The White House defended Mr Bush's comments. “He has said before that Wall Street was dealing with very complex financial instruments and that the markets didn’t fully understand the risks that those instruments posed to the system,” said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman.

“It is certainly a more colourful way of saying what he said before, but he’s described it that way before in terms of his observations of what happened to the market,” she said.

The video shows Bush joking with a friendly crowd and musing about his life when he leaves the White House in January.

“We’ve got a housing issue,” Bush said. “Not in Houston, evidently not in Dallas, because Laura’s over there trying to buy a house today.”

Bush explained that his wife no longer wished to live in rural Crawford, Texas, and preferred Dallas where the Bush presidential library will be located.

“I like Crawford, unfortunately after eight years of asking her to sacrifice, I am no longer the decision maker,” he said. “I did tell her, ’Honey, we’ve been on government pay now for 14 years, go slow.’”

Times Recommends

• Air crash: ‘Everything is burnt. It is the closest thing to Hell’
• The true story of a passionate Korean 'spy'
• I shot Lennon in the back, Chapman tells parole board