A very good piece by Simon Johnson (formerly of the IMF) about the politics of economic crises.
His point is that while there is plenty of blame, the problem boils down to changes in policy, time and time again, which benefited the financial industry.
...[B]ut these various policies—lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership—had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector’s profits—such as Brooksley Born’s now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998—were ignored or swept aside.
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