Top 10 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis

TIME Magazine published last week their list of people they think should carry blame for the financial crisis. It's a great article and if you have time you should read it in it's entirety (http://www.time.com) as it cover the top 25 people they think are to blame for the financial crisis.

As controversial as one expect any such list to be, it is saturated with ‘the usual suspects. Here they are their Top 10 in order.

#1. Angelo Mozilio
Co-founder and former CEO of mortgage-lender Countrywide. Countrywide wasn't the first to make exotic mortgages to borrowers with questionable ability to repay, but it did, in its all-out embrace of such sales, legitimize the notion that practically any adult could handle a big, fat mortgage. When Bank of America bought Countrywide in 2008, it allegedly had to pay billions to settle predatory lending claims waged against Countrywide.

#2. Phil Gramm
Gramm used his post as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee from 1995-2003 to champion financial deregulation. These two moves by Gramm were especially significant in their role in the financial crisis: 1) Gramm helped ensure that credit-default swaps were exempt from regulation by the Commodity Futures Tranding Commission, and 2) Gramm helped repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated commercial banks and Wall Street.

#3. Alan Greenspan
Greenspan was vocal in his disdain for regulation. It was this anti-regulation mentality in combination with the Federal Reserve Chairman's insistence on keeping interest rates low in the early 2000s that helped bring about the mortgage crisis. Greenspan has since admitted that his avid deregulation stance was somewhat of a "mistake."

#4. Christopher Cox
As the former chief of the SEC, Cox presided over an era of fairly lax regulation. Even though the number of investment advisors grew, the SEC did not bring on more enforcement and compliance officers to help oversee the industry.

#5. The American Consumer
It's easy to blame the Wall Street fat cats, the excess-loving CEOs and the government. But we should take a long hard look at our role as American consumers in the financial meltdown.

Household debt in America jumped to more than 130% of income in 2007. Yes, ladies and gentleman, we lived beyond - way, way beyond - our means, and now we're paying the price.

#6. Hank Paulson
Paulson, a former Goldman Sachs exec became Treasury Secretary in 2006. He ended up almost single handedly running the country's economic policy for the last year of the Bush Administration. That's some power. But did he make the right moves? Maybe not. The main complaints about Paulson are: 1) he was late in starting to aggressively battle the financial crisis, 2) he should not have let Lehman Brothers fail, and 3) bailout bill was a mess.

#7. Joe Cassano
Before the financial-sector meltdown, few people had ever heard of credit-default swaps (CDS). They are insurance contracts — or, if you prefer, wagers — that a company will pay its debt. As a founding member of AIG's financial-products unit, Cassano, who ran the group until he stepped down in early 2008, knew them quite well. In good times, AIG's massive CDS-issuance business minted money for the insurer's other companies. But those same contracts turned out to be at the heart of AIG's downfall and subsequent taxpayer rescue. So far, the U.S. government has invested and lent $150 billion to keep AIG afloat.

#8. Ian McCarthy
Homebuilders had plenty to do with the collapse of the housing market, not just by building more homes than the country could stomach, but also by pressuring people who couldn't really afford them to buy in. As CEO of Beazer Homes since 1994, McCarthy has become something of a poster child for the worst builder behaviors. An investigative series that ran in the Charlotte Observer in 2007 highlighted Beazer's aggressive sales tactics, including lying about borrowers' qualifications to help them get loans. The FBI, HUD and IRS are all investigating Beazer.

#9. Frank Raines
The mess that Fannie Mae has become is the progeny of many parents: Congress, which created Fannie in 1938 and loaded it down with responsibilities; President Lyndon Johnson, who in 1968 pushed it halfway out the government nest and into a problematic part-private, part-public role in an attempt to reduce the national debt; and Jim Johnson, who presided over Fannie's spectacular growth in the 1990s. But it was Johnson's successor, Raines, who was at the helm when things really went off course. A former Clinton Administration Budget Director, Raines was the first African-American CEO of a Fortune 500 company when he took the helm in 1999. He left in 2004 with the company embroiled in an accounting scandal just as it was beginning to make big investments in subprime mortgage securities that would later sour.

#10. Kathleen Corbet
By slapping AAA seals of approval on large portions of even the riskiest pools of loans, rating agencies helped lure investors into loading on collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that are now unsellable. Corbet ran the largest agency, Standard & Poor's, during much of this decade, though the other two major players, Moody's and Fitch, played by similar rules. How could a ratings agency put its top-grade stamp on such flimsy securities? A glaring conflict of interest is one possibility: these outfits are paid for their ratings by the bond issuer.

What on your comments on the above names, or how do you think should be added to the list?