The list is generally pretty good and sure, a few more could be added if you want to include the regulators. I also think that if you are going to add the American public - which is more than fair - the British public ought to be there including Tony Blair specifically because they loved personal credit as much if not more than the Americans. The list could also include the European banks who are even more highly leveraged than US banks. Including Bill Clinton is fair for his cooperation with Republicans on the Glass-Steagall Act though less so for the Community Reinvestment Act. Forcing banks to be fair after years of racist policy and then blaming the *global* credit crisis on poor minorities is absurd.
Either way, it's a good primer for understanding the who's who of the credit crunch. Naturally it comes as no surprise who the number one person is on the list.
Alan Greenspan, chairman of US Federal Reserve 1987- 2006
Only a couple of years ago the long-serving chairman of the Fed, a committed free marketeer who had steered the US economy through crises ranging from the 1987 stockmarket collapse through to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, was lauded with star status, named the "oracle" and "the maestro". Now he is viewed as one of those most culpable for the crisis. He is blamed for allowing the housing bubble to develop as a result of his low interest rates and lack of regulation in mortgage lending. He backed sub-prime lending and urged homebuyers to swap fixed-rate mortgages for variable rate deals, which left borrowers unable to pay when interest rates rose.
For many years, Greenspan also defended the booming derivatives business, which barely existed when he took over the Fed, but which mushroomed from $100tn in 2002 to more than $500tn five years later.
Billionaires George Soros and Warren Buffett might have been extremely worried about these complex products - Soros avoided them because he didn't "really understand how they work" and Buffett famously described them as "financial weapons of mass destruction" - but Greenspan did all he could to protect the market from what he believed was unnecessary regulation. In 2003 he told the Senate banking committee: "Derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn't be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so".
