My post on who is to blame has inspired more comments and questions than anything I've done.

There are a few big themes to the comments and I thought, rather than answer them one by one, I'll respond here.

 

1. Who cares, just what do we do next?

Very fair, and I would like to focus more attention on the pros and cons of various proposed solutions.

I do think it's important to address the blame issue, not just because it's fun. We will, there is no doubt, be seeing a major overhaul of government regulation of the financial industry. It will be hot and heated and transformative.

If we end up just easily blaming one group, we'll probably end up with worse regulation. A good understanding of who caused what is, I would think, essential to any good solution.

2. If you blame everyone, you might as well blame nobody.

Fair enough. On the very long list of the guilty, I put in lots and lots of people with varying levels of responsibility.

There clearly were some who are far more guilty than others—deceptive mortgage brokers; risk-taking, bonus-hungry investment bankers; Alan Greenspan; lax regulators.

They are all more guilty than you or me or Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon. For this, anyway.

I was really just trying to make the point that simplistically blaming one person or one group—George Bush, Republicans, Democrats—seems awfully narrow and unhelpful to me.

You are, of course, free to disagree.

3. Don't blame me. I didn't buy a house.

I hear you. I live in New York City. I don't own a house. I didn't live beyond my means. (Well, I did, but then I paid it all back.)

We are, I guess, innocent victims of the high-risk excesses of others.

4. Wait a second, Davidson, you're not innocent. You are the media. The media did a lousy job.

I feel mixed about this. I think NPR did pretty well. NPR's great business reporter, Chris Arnold, did many, many stories about the likelihood that we are in a subprime housing bubble. I give myself a lower grade. I did some stories about the possibility that it was a bubble. But, with the power of hindsight, I could, of course, have done more.

I think it was clear to many people that U.S. housing prices in many markets were growing at an unsustainable rate.

I think it was clear to many that risk was being priced far too cheaply—that too many institutions took on way too much risk for too little return.

I do not think that it was just plain obvious and every reporter should have been talking about nothing but. It's easy to say that now. But I was looking in to this in 2005, 2006, and the view that there were systemic risks to the global financial system was hard to support. There were people arguing for it, but there were far more people—of all political stripes—arguing against.

I mean, what happened is really weird and never happened before.

We should have done more on the high risks. I don't think it's easy to argue that we could have reasonably been expected to foresee what eventually happened.

Did you?