din TIME: "25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis"

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1) Phil Gramm - chairman of the Senate Banking Committee from 1995 through 2000, champion of financial deregulation. Leading role in writing the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from Wall Street.
2) Chris Cox - The ex-SEC chief's blindness to repeated allegations of fraud in the Madoff scandal is mind-blowing. The SEC also had plenty of power to go after big investment banks like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch for better disclosure, but it chose not to.
3) Angelo Mozilo - co-founded Countrywide in 1969 and built it into the largest mortgage lender in the U.S. Legitimized the notion that practically any adult could handle a big fat mortgage.
4) Joe Cassano - Ran credit-default swaps (CDS) 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.
5) Frank Raines - Former head of Fannie when things really went off course. 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.
6) Kathleen Corbet - Head of Standard & Poors rating agency, slapped AAA seals of approval on large portions of even the riskiest pools of loans. As one S&P analyst wrote in an email, "[A bond] could be structured by cows and we would rate it."
7) Ian McCarthy - As CEO of giant homebuilder Beazer Homes since 1994, McCarthy has become something of a poster child for the worst builder behaviors, including aggressive sales tactics, and lying about borrowers' qualifications to help them get loans.
8) Bernie Madoff - His pyramid scheme could inflict $50 billion in losses on society types, retirees and nonprofits. The bigger cost for America comes from the notion that Madoff pulled off the biggest financial fraud in history right under the noses of regulators.
9) Dick Fuld - Steered Lehman deep into the business of subprime mortgages, bankrolling lenders across the country that were making convoluted loans to questionable borrowers. The firm took all those loans, whipped them into bonds and passed on to investors billions of dollars of what is now toxic debt.
10) Marion and Herb Sandler - In the early 1980s, the Sandlers' World Savings Bank became the first to sell a tricky home loan called the option ARM. Sold their bank to Wachovia in 2006. Wachovia later imploded and was sold under duress late last year to Wells Fargo.
11) Stan O'Neal - Merrill Lynch's celebrated CEO for nearly six years, ending in 2007, he guided the firm from its familiar turf — fee businesses like asset management — into the lucrative game of creating collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which were largely made of subprime mortgage bonds.
12) John Devaney - Hedge fund manager, in early 2007, said about option ARM mortgages, "The consumer has to be an idiot to take on one of those loans, but it has been one of our best-performing investments."
13) Sandy Weill - Helped mold the first great financial supermarket, Citigroup. The swollen banks are now one of the country's major economic problems. The government has already spent $45 billion trying to fix it.
14) Jimmy Cayne - Former CEO of Bear Stearns' Cayne. Two of its highly leveraged hedge funds collapsed in mid-2007. Bear held nearly $40 billion in mortgage bonds that were essentially worthless. In early 2008 Bear was sold to JPMorgan for less than the value of its office building. "I didn't stop it. I didn't rein in the leverage," Cayne later told Fortune.
15) 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.
16) American Consumers - In the third quarter of 2008, Americans began saving more and spending less. We've been borrowing, borrowing, borrowing — living off and believing in the wealth effect, first in stocks, which ended badly, then in real estate, which has ended even worse.
17) Alan Greenspan - The Federal Reserve chairman. 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.
18) Hank Paulson - In 2006, became treasury secretary. 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.
19) David Lereah - Chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, an industry trade group, he said the housing market is going to keep on chugging foreve. Says he grew concerned about the direction of the market in 2006, but consider his January 2007 statement: "It appears we have established a bottom."
20) Lew Ranieri - Father of mortgage-backed bonds, in which home loans were packaged together by Wall Street firms and sold to institutional investors. But when subprime borrowers started missing payments, the mortgage market stalled and bond prices collapsed.
21) David Oddsson - Iceland's Prime Minister and then central-bank governor, he privatized the three main banks there. Iceland's economy is now a textbook case of macroeconomic meltdown. Nice experiment.
22) Fred Goodwin - Former boss of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), some say that Goodwin is simply "the world's worst banker." In 2007, Goodwin couldn't resist leading a $100 billion takeover of Dutch rival ABN Amro, stretching RBS's capital reserves to the limit, later causing the bank to collapse.
23) Bill Clinton - President Clinton's tenure was characterized by economic prosperity and financial deregulation, which in many ways set the stage for the excesses of recent years.
24) Wen Jiabao - One Chinese official responsible for supplying the U.S. with an unprecedented amount of credit over the past eight years. If cheap credit was the crack cocaine of this financial crisis then China was one of its primary dealers.
25) Burton Jablin - Programming czar for HGTV and other lifestyle channels, helped inflate the real estate bubble by teaching viewers how to extract value from their homes.
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(Intreg articolul din TIME Magazine). Nu e clasamentul final, inca se mai voteaza ...