Responsibility, Repair and Redistribution in the Wake of the Financial Crisis

Who bears responsibility for the financial crisis? The list of possible culprits is unmanageably long and at times internally inconsistent, as it includes subprime mortgages and over-zealous mortgage originators; risk-happy investment bankers and the ineffectual ratings agents who rubber-stamped the bankers' exotic products; and neoconservatives hell-bent on deregulation along with liberal politicians cowering before entities they allowed to become too big to fail.1 Nonetheless the question of responsibility seems to demand an answer not only for purposes of arriving at lessons that might avert a future crisis but also for answering a second question that seems a natural corollary of the first—viz., who bears responsibility for funding the bailouts necessitated by the financial crisis? More specifically, who in the United States bears responsiblity for funding the bailouts undertaken by the U.S. government?