Debate over who is most to blame for the financial meltdown rages on against a backdrop of economic pain and anxiety that's unprecedented in the post-war era.
The bottom line: There was a feeding frenzy that drove housing prices far beyond what the fundamental laws of supply and demand would dictate. People certainly got in over their heads, but the ultimate responsibility for that lies with the investment bankers who cooked up exotic new ways to make risky investments look more secure than they actually were (I wrote about it recently here).
While the U.S. housing market is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 trillion, it was Wall Street's wheeler-dealers -- and their lobbyists and allies who kept regulators out of their business -- who built a house of cards out of "exotic" mortgage-backed products and other "derivatives" worth as much as 60 times that figure -- paper wealth backed by little more than the irrational belief that what goes up will never come down.
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