Barney Frank for interim senator?

First, this entire story is so complicated and so large there is plenty of blame to go around (and surprisingly, the person who gets the least blame in some of the most authoritative books - Too Big to Fail and and All the Devils Are Here - is George W. who barely earns a mention).

Ignoring the role of Fannie and Freddie in this is like saying drug runners and distributors are not largely responsible for our drug problem. They enabled the entire house of cards this was built on and just like the banks, overleveraged themselves to the point they almost took the government down with them (and who knows if they still might - there's been a lot of financial "engineering" behind the scenes).

As the article points out - the banks issued the loans and through a combination of some fraud and mostly poor underwriting standards in the pursuit of profits, and they are to blame for their role in that. They were enabled by Fannie and Freddie who bought many of these loans as well as the commercial and investment banks who sliced and diced them on the other end and then sold off the pieces. If you read the literature, Fannie and Freddie got away with plenty in large part because they had very powerful friends in Congress, including Barney Frank. You can argue forever over his level of blame, but you can't argue that he played some level of a material role in the disaster that ensued (again, on at least one and I believe more than one occasion George W. tried to reign in F&F but he and his appointees gave up because Congress wouldn't play ball - Republicans up to 2006 and Dems thereafter)

One final note that I found interesting in my reading on the topic. This crisis came to a head so relatively fast that the entire crisis was probably impossible to avert because almost nobody saw it coming (and those that predicted a disaster at best only got the causes partly right). If certain things had been stopped as late as 2005, we may have had a headache or slight hangover, but not a disease that almost killed us and still might. The rapid growth of subprime loans at the end of the real estate bubble and the magnified harm of synthetic derivatives that exploded from 2006 to 2007 was what pushed us over the edge. Not only the CEO's of the companies, but most of the people dealing with this toxic waste on a daily basis, had no idea until the very end that this stuff could blow up as fast and as violently as it did.