The global "crisis" - who's to blame

Merryn Somerset Webb is an investment adviser and editor of Moneyweek who has a column in the weekend Financial Times. This week's begins "IтАЩm rather enjoying this monthтАЩs search for a scapegoat for the banking crisis. Pretty much everyone operating in the financial markets is a bit to blame in one way or another. So itтАЩs good to see them all getting knifed in turn тАУ from bonus-crazed traders, short sellers, central banks and the regulators, right down to the general public and their once insatiable appetite for cheap debt". I think that pretty much sums up the gamut of contributions on this Forum too. The rest of the column can be read at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3c99d0f6-8bed ... fd18c.html (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3c99d0f6-8bed-11dd-8a4c-0000779fd18c.html)

Its steevekoolguys fault - trust me!

[Lunchtime O'Booze]

The global "crisis" - who's to blame

..surely Henry Cate had a hand in it !

A few years back there was a movie version of the Dickens novel "Little Dorritt". In it there was also a financial collapse central to the story and similar to what we face today.
The characters caught up in the debacle kept repeating the mantra "There's no one to blame, no one's at fault", as if the whole calamity was an act of nature.
Finally one character gets fed up and says something like "Nonsense! Everyone's at fault. Everyone who fed at the trough is to blame".

Now we're fervently looking for the SOB that pushed over the first domino without understanding that most of us had a hand in setting up the dominoes in the first place.

There were a lot of people, Rich, Middle Class and Poor, who were feeding at the trough of the "Real Estate Boom."

(PS. my quotes from "Little Dorritt" are not exact because it was a long time since I saw it. It's worth renting to get a historical view of what we're going through.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5tZc8oH--o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs&eur