Cassandra time

The CNN/Money website has an article indicating that federal regulators had been getting warnings as early as 2005 about the riskiness of sub-prime mortgages and the exposure of banks to them.

The regulators didn't follow through largely because of the free-market ideology of both the Bush administration and Alan Greenspan and largely because of lobbying by the banks holding these loans, many of which, like WaMu and IndyMac, have since failed.

There would be an element of poetic justice involved in that last bit if there wasn't so much collateral damage.