25 People To Blame For The Financial Crisis

TIME's picks for the top 25 people to blame for the financial crisis includes everyone from former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and former President George W. Bush to the former CEO of Merrill Lynch and you — the American consumer. As you read our choices, we'd like to know who you think deserves the most blame, and the least.

Angelo Mozilo
The son of a butcher, Mozilo co-founded Countrywide in 1969 and built it into the largest mortgage lender in the U.S. Countrywide wasn't the first to offer exotic mortgages to borrowers with a questionable ability to repay them. In its all-out embrace of such sales, however, it did legitimize the notion that practically any adult could handle a big fat mortgage.

Phil Gramm
He played a leading role in writing and pushing through Congress the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from Wall Street. He also inserted a key provision into the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that exempted over-the-counter derivatives like credit-default swaps from regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Credit-default swaps took down AIG, which has cost the U.S. $150 billion thus far.


Alan Greenspan
The super-low interest rates Greenspan brought in the early 2000s and his long-standing disdain for regulation are now held up as leading causes of the mortgage crisis.

Chris Cox
American Consumers
Hank Paulson
Joe Cassano
Ian McCarthy
Kathleen Corbet
Frank Raines
Dick Fuld
Marion and Herb Sandler
Bill Clinton
George W. Bush
Stan O'Neal
Wen Jiabao
David Lereah
John Devaney
Bernie Madoff
Lew Ranieri
Burton Jablin
Fred Goodwin
Sandy Weill
David Oddsson
Jimmy Cayne

After voting on the relative guilt (or innocence) of each person, view the full results here.