Oh I thought it was going to be something lame like "YOU" because weren't we Time man of the year recently?

#15: American people, who signed up for ARMs without reading the contract or caring what was going to happen to their payments in 3 years.

well seems like im not the only one that thinks "we the people" should be to blame too.

but then.. its never our fault.. those evil people... rich evil people..

@Segador: Actually I signed up for an ARM 5 years ago. Last summer I started to look into what I could do about refinancing and it was suggested that I wait till my mortgage holder sends my letter telling me what my new rate is. Ubelievably, my rate dropped from 5.25 to 3.78. Don't know how, don't know why, but I will take it and run! Till next year when it resets again.

I think they forgot to put some of the blame on incompetent federal regulators. Many of the smaller local banks that are now struggling were/are owned but real estate developers. Regulators should have seen that inherent conflict of interest and intervened.

There's only two words I can think of now that I looked through the list; Cock Suckers

I blame 90% of it on the American public. If the demand for crap like homes and cars you can't afford didn't exist, companies wouldn't facilitate it. It's your own damn fault and nobody else's for the decisions you've made that have completely screwed you over.

Oh, and I blame Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton for the subprime mortgage meltdown, which seems to have been a huge catalyst in this whole situation.

Where's Barney Frank? Also, it wasn't just deregulation that got us in this mess, it was forced regulation. Mr. Frank and his cronies are responsible for those bad housing loans. They made sure that people who couldn't afford them got them. The banks that didn't give them were chastised until they weren't able to do any business.

congrats Time on missing half of the true people who really boned us.

And yes the American public for being stupid enough to think "you mean 0% now and ?% later, sign me up!"

Pretty good article. Mostly correct. I didn't see Barney Frank and some of the others who laughed at the Fannie/Freddie regulators.

Blaming the guy who works for HGTV for flipping houses shows? Are you serious? lol.

@kiltman: Nothing wrong with ARM's if you fully understand the terms.

@Segador: Yes, borrowers should have been smarter when the mortgage expert told them they could simply refinance once the rate adjusted upward. Smarter than the expert.

@Bladefist: I second Barney Frank, he deserves more of the blame than the majority of people on the list in my opinion.

@Segador: As far as I'm concerned, each of those people only dug his or her own grave. It was the companies who offered those things to people with no proof of income who turned their problem into everyone's problem.

Can someone just list the people here so I don't have to go through the lagging slideshow?

Bernie Maddoff? Sure, he's a piece of excrement, but did he *cause* the financial crisis?

Wen Jiabao? "We'd be fine if you'd stop buying all our debt!"

This list is silly.

@nytmare: Oh God, this.

I had a friend pressuring me and pressuring me to buy a home because she bought into that whole "you're not a human being unless you own a house" mentality that's been thrown at us for years.

She went on to tell me how great the housing market was and that there were these "new" mortgages out there that would let me buy a fantastic house, live in it for three years, and then resell it for XBOX HUEG PROFFIT. And oh yeah, the payments are less than what you're paying for rent right now and that I'm an idiot for not getting in on this.

After looking at the terms closely, I realized I'd be fucked six ways to Sunday if after three years I was unable to sell the damned house and I ran the hell away and never looked back.

@kiltman: Just a little unsolicited advice - if your loan allows it, make extra principle payments while the rate is low. e.g. just keep sending the same amount you did while the rate was 5.25, or send even more if you can afford it. Since you're relatively early in the loan, anything you can do to put more toward principle will increase your equity, shorten your term, and save money over the long haul.

I would put people who pushed deregulation like Gramm high on the list. They changed the rules allowing it to happen. Just remember that Bush was seriously pushing home ownership when he first took office.
I also blame all of these major banks who were so greedy they ignored looking at the long term. All they knew was there were more foreign investors wanting something to invest in so they created this mess to sell them shares of.

Our conservative govt. bears a large portion of the blame. No the American people are not the first to blame on this. Many people did not fall for the scammy loans or buy tons of crap they didn't need. I do blame those that did for being too stupid to determine they were being sold something. Some people just assumed if some tool in a suit told them something was a good investment or you had to have "x" to be someone that it was true. Time to push these people to think for themselves a bit more.

@shifuimam: You've got to be kidding, right? Just two D's 12 years apart? OK one more time, because I know this is going to show up over and over: The laws that Carter passed DID NOT FORCE BANKS TO LEND TO PEOPLE WHO COULD NOT AFFORD IT. They said you can't discriminate just because of where you live (i.e. can't reject a loan because the house is in a minority neighborhood). So black family and white family making same money but living in different hoods' should be treated the same.

Clinton- actually shares some of the blame. He did help deregulate some of the financial services industry that helped cause this (GLB in particular).

But if we're throwing around blame, here are a few others:

Bush II- who pushed home ownership; further deregulated or failed to enforce; tried to prop up economy by lowering interest rates to nothing; borrowed huge amounts of money to pay for tax cuts.

Banks- gave money to anyone who asked for it, no questions asked. Didn't even consider the number of toxic assets they had. Intentionally merged to become "fail-proof." Even after getting TARP funds, have not lent money (even to those who would qualify). Continue to pay themselves handsomely.

@shifuimam: Can you be more specific about Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton?

I blame Queen Elizabeth II.

@lodleader: Yeah, but at least they aren't pointing at just one person like so many other articles have. The probleme was created by a number of factors, not just one thing. The people who took the loans who didn't understand what they meant are part of it but, some did understand it and then couldn't refinance later.

@ARP: The lack of regulation wasn't/isn't the issue. Its that existing regulators sit on their hands and do nothing. Further regulation does nothing when existing regulations aren't enforced.

@Bladefist: You know, I laughed at that too at first. I don't blame him, but I think he's a symbol of the times. EVERYONE was talking about real estate: Bush, banks, ads, neighboors, TV shows, etc. It was sold to us as the fool-proof investment. You have to admit the amount of attention on real estate was striking. That doesn't mean you can throw common sense out the window, but there was a certain herd mentality. I have a strange rule of investing, when my small town aunt is talking about how X is going to be the next big investment, I know that investment bubble is going to burst.

@lodleader: They're in there. The American consumer. The really f*cked up thing about our economy is that if those people didn't shop with money they didn't have, we might be in the same situation. Our economy is based so much on consumer spending that when people are financially responsible, it a bad thing. Messed up.

Can I just say that I hate this outcropping of "blame these guys" stories? In reading the article, there's very little information to establish cause and effect. For example, they have a regulator on there who pioneered mortgage securitization. Can you draw a straight line between that and the housing crisis? I can't, not even close, and I've got first-hand knowledge of most of this stuff. The whole article reads like "Here are some talking points! Hate these people!" That's some crappy journalism as far as I'm concerned, and it inevitably creates a populace that just isn't well-informed with respect to the "mortgage crisis." If people don't fully understand the causes of financial bubbles (particularly this one), they won't understand the regulatory/policy response. The fourth estate can't seem to avoid collapsing lately.

@Bladefist: I put studduhwing Bawny in the top ten of this list. But oh wait, you can't point out anything he does as bad because that would be offensive.

I still blame the American consumer and borrower more than any fatcat banker, though.

I think the Realtor industry is getting off far too easy in all this. I liked my Realtor ok when I bought my house, but he certainly never said "you know, there's a more affordable neighborhood down the street that you might like."

If a car salesman manipulates someone into a car they can't afford just so he can score a fat commission, I think most people here would say he shares some of the blame. Realtors do the exact same thing and are getting off scott free? I don't get it. They preyed on the emotion of a new house and, to a certain extent, the greed, driving those market values up, up, up.

I agree that most of the fault still lies with the people who's signature is on the dotted line, but if we're blaming mortgage brokers, the realtors who walk hand-in-hand with them deserve a piece of the blame too.

@sleze69: At the bottom of the first page of the slide show there is a link to a page that contains the entire 25 people rather than just the top few.

@Bladefist: I completely agree with that one. I think the US consumer should be higher on the list and those shows contributed to the house mania. I would also like to see the NAR listed along with Lawrence Yun, its economist/cheerleader.

@shifuimam: Oh, and I blame Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton for the subprime mortgage meltdown, which seems to have been a huge catalyst in this whole situation.

I can see you typing but all I hear is Rush Limbaugh talking.

@HIV 2 Elway Resurrected: I agree. There are laws on the books that would have mitigated (probably not stopped) this. Bush was the master of not enforcing laws/regs or taking extreme interpretations of them to justify his ideology. (See: only organ failure pain constitutes torture, can ignore all laws dealing with military as commander in chief, passed zero OSHA regs and repealed many, starved consumer products saftey orgs, etc.)

@ADismalScience: So the problem that irritates you most here is the journalism?

@Real Cheese Flavor: If you're wondering how I know that idiot consumers who signed idiot ARMs share a large portion of the blame, it's because I was one of those idiot consumers. I bought a house 4 years ago on a ridiculous ARM, and lost the house. I've been there, done that, and educated myself so it never happens again.

@ADismalScience: Internet lists in general are crappy journalism.

How could Barney Frank not be on this list?

@lowercase: Realtors have little incentive to sell you a more expensive home. Their increased commission on a $50k increase in purchase price is only $1500, and even that gets divvied up. Their incentive is to get you to buy ANY house as quickly as they can so they can move on to the next client.

@ADismalScience: In short there is not a single cause of the melt-down. It was a number of actors over a number of years that caused it. No single actor was the cause. So no straight lines are possible. That said, we'd have a lot of criminals roaming the street if we could only use direct evidence.

But I think what you're saying is part of the problem: people like bumper sticker solutions to problems that are hugely complex (blame Bush, blame Clinton, cut taxes, etc.). The reality is that the causes are often complex and so the solutions sometimes must be complex. But the American attention span and desire to focus on something to hate/blame for their problems prevents serious discussion of the issues.

Chris Cox and Alan Green Span top my list. I heard the NPR story on Chris Cox at the end of last year and it was chilling...

Sad thing about the Time list is that all of those creeps are cashed out- they have made their money and walked away or are retired from the government with a government pension and free health care for the rest of their lives- on our taxes.

Dubya should be NUMBER 1, no doubt. He, of all people, had more power to do something but did nothing but help the disaster along and give the treasury away.

@JustThatGuy3: It's Time magazine, what do you expect?

@ARP: Bush has very little influence on the day to day activities of banking regulators. Every bank merger (and if you look at the trends there are fewer and fewer banks each year, so they are merging) needs to be approved by the FDIC, every single one. Many mergers should have raised huge red flags but were approved by the FDIC.

Not to mention, when regulators finally do step in they do nothing but further cripple the already struggling bank.

I@econobiker: I also blame the banks as there is some information now that they get paid more to service delingquint mortgages than paid up-to-date ones.

@savdavid: I blame Bush for a lot of stuff (and actually believes he deserves it), but I don't know that he's No. 1 here. I view his role more as failing to mitigate rather than actively encouraging it to happen. He was asleep at the switch, but didn't put the trains in motion.

Are we all forgetting the "interesting" Securities that Wall Street cooked up, things like Credit Default Swaps, that allowed banks to leverage themselved 10 to 1 and more?

That was like building a house of cards in a wind storm, just one failure and everything goes, since it is ALL overleveraged. But, wait that would never happen, right? Lehman Brothers?

Yes the American public does share some of the blame, but with CEO's taking milti-million yearly "performance Bonuses" regardless of performance, what kind of an example is the average American given?

@shifuimam: Your hyperbole is showing.

@JustThatGuy3: I agree that Barney Frank should be on the list. I also view Barney Frank's failure as part of the problem in Washington- hyper-partisanship. Barney viewed any attempt to regulate Fannie as Republicans trying to gut that system and screw over people who might need some help getting into their first home. Similarly, Republicans viewed any government regulation and/or spending on the stimulus as communism and opposed it. This attitude of giving an inch means I lost causes a lot of the troubles we've had.

@econobiker: Sorry this was supposed to go with the last one:

Yahoo News:
How Banks Are Worsening the Foreclosure Crisis
By Brian Grow, Keith Epstein and Robert Berner

[news.yahoo.com]

No mention of Barney "There's nothing wrong with Fannie Mae" Frank or Chris "Sweetheart deal with Countrywide" Dodd?

Useless list.