THE NEXT TIME YOU HEAR OR READ THAT

Fannie, Freddie, the CRA or Chuck Schumer created the Big ShitPile, remember where the Wall Street Journal put most of the blame:

For the U.S. securities industry to unravel as spectacularly as it did in September, many parties had to pull on many threads. Mortgage bankers gave loans to Americans for homes they couldn’t afford. Investment houses packaged these loans into complex instruments whose risk they didn’t always understand. Ratings agencies often gave their seal of approval, investors borrowed heavily to buy, regulators missed the warning signs. But at the center of it all — and paid hundreds of millions of dollars during the boom to manage their firms’ risk — were the four bosses of Wall Street.

From "The Weekend That Wall Street Died", WSJ, 12/29,2008

(h/t Barry Ritholtz)