Placing the Blame

Andrew Sullivan defends Greenspan against James Kwak:

At least Greenspan has admitted his mistake.

I like the reason given by Judd Bagley:

Imagine an apartment building which, due to the unwise actions of its greedy management, devolved into a dangerous fire trap.

One day, an arsonist puts a match to some of the many piles of oily rags in the basement, with predictable results. Whom is to blame for the spectacular conflagration that follows? The greedy management or the firebug?

Everybody here seems to be looking for specific managers at fault for the poor state of the building, while the role of the arsonists has been ignored.
In this case, the arsonists were the short selling hedge funds that orchestrated the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers (learn more about them here).
Would we be in this bind even if Bear and Lehman had survived? Maybe. But it always costs less to bring an old building up to code than to build anew -- to say nothing of the human toll.

So...I blame short selling hedge funds.