One of the most frustrating things about this financial "crisis" is that there appears to be no one responsible. It seemed like a day after 9/11 we were invading someone's country and smoking them out of caves.
But now we are in the throes of the worst global financial meltdown in history and no one saw it coming or could have prevented it?
Well plenty of people saw this coming and there are plenty of people to blame, some of them very public. This NYT article is a start although the comments on Big Picture may be more informative.
Taking Hard New Look at a Greenspan Legacy
October 8, 2008
New York Times
“Not only have individual financial institutions become less vulnerable to shocks from underlying risk factors, but also the financial system as a whole has become more resilient.” — Alan Greenspan in 2004
George Soros, the prominent financier, avoids using the financial contracts known as derivatives “because we don’t really understand how they work.” Felix G. Rohatyn, the investment banker who saved New York from financial catastrophe in the 1970s, described derivatives as potential “hydrogen bombs.”
And Warren E. Buffett presciently observed five years ago that derivatives were “financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.”
