Who is To Blame For The Financial Crisis?

I choose "D - All of the above."

I second Sheryl. Everyone's had a hand in screwing things up.

Don't forget "E" (you and me).
Anyone who does not follow politics every day of every year is at fault.
If you do not participate, you cannot complain.
It's a lot of work, but if we ALL get involved, we can take back the (American) political system, and make it work for US (not "them").

Follow the issues, write your elected officials, let them know what you want/like/don't like, and follow their voting records.
There are several sites on the internet that will give you the email/address/phone of your elected (state or federal) representives, so you can't say you don't know how to reach them.

I say that IF WE ALL BUG THEM, THEY WILL BE FORCED TO ACT!!!

I've always blamed Rick Springfield. The man has to be held accountable for SOMETHING.

I would also like to add that when I heard about Paulson's little switch from the SEC overseeing regulation to the Fed I almost gagged! Stiglitz certainly hit the nail on the head there. The Fed was the group that HAD oversight already of the mortgage industry and could have done something about this sub-prime debacle over a year ago when things started hitting the fan, as they say. They bowed to the big guys who told them that things would be okay, instead of doing their appointed job, and look where THAT got us!

And Paulson wants to take oversight out of the SEC's hands (who, BTW, do an excellent job with the power given to them) and give more oversight power to the FED???? Are you serious??????? It's not even a government body - it's a private organization that works in *questionable* partnership with our government. I say take power FROM them, since they have proven not capable of handling it.

Tom,

My grandfather (maternal - and who I never actually met, he passed before I was born) always said if you don't vote, don't complain too.

Unfortunately for those of us who do take the time to follow and attempt to make our voices heard the apathetic ones still retain their Freedom of Speech, we just know better than to take them seriously. It has been my experience that the vocal yet lazy ones are usually just spouting some rhetoric (usually false to the nth degree) that they heard from someone else along the way, why bother to think or vote when you can just whine.

And I think you have it right on the bug them issue too. Oh you did not mean to actually bug as in warrantless wire tap did you? Companies, industries, unions, and special interest groups all have lobbyists who they pay to do this. The average citizen does not have a lobbyist so we must be our own best advocate. I have seen this actually work before.

I do slightly disagree with the follow it every day of every year. Sometimes I am to ill to follow it. Some days I can't read because of visual problems. I can't be the only one who has this problem but I do think on every day that we can we should.

a general lack of consciousness, short-sighted avarice, the usual suspects

Bush and his cronies. It is very simple, the bigger the deficit, the less the dollar is worth. The less the dollar is worth the higher intrest rates go. The higher the intrest rates go, the poorer Americans become.

Why is the deficit so huge and growing by billions of dollars a day, is because of the war in Iraq. Why are we in Iraq, in order to make Halliburton richer. It is that simple.

I agree, Bush and his cronies.

My vote's with Sheryl's.

I vote for all of the above as well. Including e. Not that figuring out who to blame will actually fix anything, but I guess that's part of what we do when it hits the fan.

Wil - figuring out the root causes IS the first step to figuring out the correcting actions to take. It's when we DON'T do that, or are not honest about the resulting data, or avoid responsibility with the old "let's not point fingers" schtick, that "it" will keep hitting the fan in the future.

Deborah,
Thanks for your comment, very welcome. As for your problems with visuals I'm working on a way we can tweak gather pages to give bigger text (got that done) with more white space between lines (I'm stuck on that) as several people have said to me they find longer articles difficult.

At the moment I am posting my own long articles with a link to a page offsite where text is bigger and there is more whitespace (I also open the page in a new window with a "close" button to bring readers back to gather to comment or move on.

I'll keep you informed of progress.

Sheryl,
I think it goes back to the late 1960s when business started pushing for deregulation. From a British p.o.v. we used to have the bulk of motrgage lending in the hands of mutual trusts called Building Societies. These were non profit (BLASPHEMY!!!) organisations, savings and loan companies really, that funded mortgage lending from money deposited by savers.

It kept house prices down and regulated the housing stock at about 50% owner occupied and 50% rented. The banks envied the legally protected position of Building Societies and pushed at Government to be let in.

Then Thatcher was elected on a promise of making us all rich by taxing the poor (overlooking the fact that the poor pay no tax because they have no money) and we have just gone downhill from there.

Tom,
We do have some responsibility. But here in the UK at least we can claim that, as one of our leading ex-radical sellouts once said, "If voting changed anything they would abolish it."

Antichrist,
A wikipedia search (I'd never heard of him) tells me Rick Springfield is a middle of the road singer and a long term soap actor.
Isn't that enough crime against humanity for one man?

libramoon,
reality is biting us on the arse at last.

Juan, Elaine,
Bush certainly in the US and Blair in Britain, but I think the root of the problem is deeper than that.

Sheryl & Steph,
I don't know enough about the structure of the fed to draw you out on that viewpoint.

Wil,
Figuring out who is to blame will enable us to avoid giving them the power to screw things up again.
The cycle of bubble and burst economics has been going on since the South Sea Bubble the result of the first deregulation after the political upheaval cause by the Protestant Reformation which stripped to monarchy of regulatory powers and opened up a free trade regime. In common with the present crisis, worthless financial vehicles (shares in the South Sea Trading Company which did hardly any trading) were changing hands for ludicrous prices.
So its not "who is to blame" but what. And what is the deregulation of financial traders.

Ian - I would add to the lack of regulation in that Wall Street is very creative. My husband's take on the matter, after 30 years in the investment industry, is that there are way too many product development people in the industry sitting around with nothing to do. They are coming up with the strangest financial "products" now, one criterion of which is that they do not fall under any particular body's established regulatory rules or oversight. Then, they see how long they can get away with marketing and selling it to the public before the SEC or some other regulatory body catches on that there should be somebody "watching the store".

The problem with the sub-prime mortgage debacle is that this "new product" was actually a scam version of an existing product that the Federal Reserve had regulatory (or at least watchfulness) responsibility over. They fell down on that responsibility by being talked into the safety of the product by the very people who were financially benefitting from it....always a mistake to listen to those people and take their words for safety.

Sheryl,
I remember a boozy night in Stockholm when my colleagues and I worked out the best way to get rich is by selling things that don't exist.

Think about it (and ask your hubby) It is absolutely true. Investment vehicles, financial derivatives, they do not exist, but have made billions for traders while the guy running the metal bashing shop is doing OK but not exactly getting rich.

We were all consultants selling "expertise" so we had inside knowledge.

" Wil - figuring out the root causes IS the first step to figuring out the correcting actions to take. It's when we DON'T do that, or are not honest about the resulting data, or avoid responsibility with the old "let's not point fingers" schtick, that "it" will keep hitting the fan in the future."

Agreed. But figuring out the real root causes is a lot harder than just pointing the finger of blame at whatever target is the most convenient.