1. Angelo Mozilo: founded Countrywide which egitimized the notion that practically any adult could handle a big fat mortgage
2. Phil Gramm: As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee from 1995 through 2000, Gramm was Washington's most prominent and outspoken champion of financial deregulation. He played a leading role in writing and pushing through Congress the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from Wall Street. He also inserted a key provision into the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that exempted over-the-counter derivatives like credit-default swaps from regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Credit-default swaps took down AIG, which has cost the U.S. $150 billion thus far.
3. Alan Greenspan: the super-low interest rates Greenspan brought in the early 2000s and his long-standing disdain for regulation are now held up as leading causes of the mortgage crisis.
4. Chris Cox: SEC had plenty of power to go after big investment banks like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch for better disclosure, but it chose not to. Cox oversaw the dwindling SEC staff and a sharp drop in action against some traders.
5. American Consumers: Household debt in the U.S. — the money we owe as individuals — zoomed to more than 130% of income in 2007, up from about 60% in 1982. We enjoyed living beyond our means — no wonder we wanted to believe it would never end.
6. Hank Paulson: The three main gripes against Paulson are that he was late to the party in battling the financial crisis, letting Lehman Brothers fail was a big mistake and the big bailout bill he pushed through Congress has been a wasteful mess.
7. Joe Cassano: a founding member of AIG's financial-products unit.. with its credit-default swaps (CDS) that urned 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: As CEO of Beazer Homes since 1994, with its aggressive sales tactics, including lying about borrowers' qualifications to help them get loans.
9. Frank Raines: presided over Fannie Mae, 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.
11. Dick Fuld: steered Lehman deep into the business of subprime mortgages, bankrolling lenders across the country that were making convoluted loans to questionable borrowers.
12. Marion and Herb Sandler: n the early 1980s, the Sandlers' World Savings Bank became the first to sell a tricky home loan called the option ARM. And they pushed the mortgage, which offered several ways to back-load your loan and thereby reduce your early payments, with increasing zeal and misleading advertisements over the next two decades.
13. Bill Clinton: signed into law Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, also rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act, which put added pressure on banks to lend in low-income neighborhoods. It is the subject of heated political and scholarly debate whether any of these moves are to blame for our troubles, but they certainly played a role in creating a permissive lending environment.
14. George W. Bush: From the start, Bush embraced a governing philosophy of deregulation. That trickled down to federal oversight agencies, which in turn eased off on banks and mortgage brokers. When SEC head William Donaldson tried to boost regulation of mutual and hedge funds, he was blocked by Bush's advisers at the White House as well as other powerful Republicans and quit. Plus, let's face it, the meltdown happened on Bush's watch.
15. Stan O'Neal: Merrill Lynch's CEO for nearly six years, ending in 2007, he guided the firm into the lucrative game of creating collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which were largely made of subprime mortgage bonds.
16. Wen Jiabao: If cheap credit was the crack cocaine of this financial crisis — and it was — then China was one of its primary dealers. China is now the largest creditor to the U.S. government, holding an estimated $1.7 trillion in dollar-denominated debt.
17. David Lereah: chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, regularly trumpeted the infallibility of housing as an investment in interviews
18. John Devaney: By buying up mortgage loans, Devaney and other hedge-fund managers made it profitable for lenders to make questionable loans and then sell them off. In early 2007, talking about option ARM mortgages, he told Money, "The consumer has to be an idiot to take on one of those loans, but it has been one of our best-performing investments."
19. Bernie Madoff: His alleged Ponzi scheme could inflict $50 billion in losses on society types, retirees and nonprofits.
20. Lew Ranieri: In the late 1970s, he coined the term securitization to name a tidy bit of financial alchemy in which home loans were packaged together by Wall Street firms and sold to institutional investors.
21. Burton Jablin: The programming czar at Scripps Networks, which owns HGTV and other lifestyle channels, helped inflate the real estate bubble by teaching viewers how to extract value from their homes.
22. Fred Goodwin: former boss of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). More than 20 takeovers helped him transform RBS into a world beater after he assumed control in 2000 and then $100 billion takeover of Dutch rival ABN Amro, stretching RBS's capital reserves to the limit. The result: the British government last fall pumped $30 billion into the bank, which expects 2008 losses to be the biggest in U.K. corporate history.
23. Sandy Weill: he cobbled together the first great financial supermarket, Citigroup, persistent lobbying shattered Glass-Steagall, the law that limited the investing risks banks could take. Rivals followed Citi. The swollen banks are now one of the country's major economic problems.
24. David Oddsson: In his two decades as Iceland's Prime Minister and then as central-bank governor, Oddsson made his tiny country an experiment in free-market economics by privatizing three main banks. The three banks, which were massively leveraged, are in receivership, GDP could drop 10% this year, and the IMF has stepped in after the currency lost more than half its value.
25. Jimmy Cayne: CEO of Bear Stearns Bear held nearly $40 billion in mortgage bonds that were essentially worthless.
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877351_1877350,00.html(and you can vote on each one innocent or guilty)
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