Let's play the blame game again

Justin Fox at Time Magazine plays the Financial Crisis Blame Game and, not surprisingly comes out with you-know-how at the top. Well, actually, "Good Times" came out on top, which is a curious selection, particularly when looking at the rest of the list which contains no other real surprises.

Here's the list (my comments are in parentheses):

1. Good Times
2. Alan Greenspan (lost to a 1970s comedy series?)
3. Twisted Regulation
4. Wall Street
5. The Homeownership Obsession (not HGTV?)
6. Too Much Money (see #2)
7. The Myth of the Rational Market (damn economists)
8. You and Me (hey, speak for yourself)
9. George W. Bush
10. Commodity Futures Modernization Act

This is not an altogether different result than the poll by the U.K.'s Times Online from last week in which it was found that The finger points across the Atlantic and, after that, to their leader of recent years, Gordon Brown.

Here's the part about The Maestro, from whom, little has been heard in recent months, at least according to the website Alan Greenspan News:

It was to smother financial panics that Congress created the Federal Reserve in 1913. During Alan Greenspan's tenure as chairman, the Fed jumped in to keep the 1987 stock-market crash, the 1998 Long-Term Capital Management scare and the 2000-01 tech-stock collapse from spiraling into something worse. But that very successful firefighting fostered the risk-ignoring attitudes that brought on a conflagration. There are some — like 2008 presidential candidate Ron Paul — who argue that the lesson here is that we'd be better off without the Fed. A more palatable interpretation is that if the Fed is going to step in to prevent panics, it needs to do more to deflate the bubbles that inevitably precede those panics. Fed policy over the past quarter-century has been asymmetrical: it bailed institutions out of trouble but did ever less to restrain them during fulsome times. That has to change.

There are handy links to related lists at the bottom of each of the ten blamees, all of which is likely to make readers a bit depressed.

To improve the overall experience, consider playing this Time Warp ringtone from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (right-click, open in new tab, then hit the big red play button).