I got banned from a couple of conservative fora back in 2008 for insisting that the Bush administration owned the crisis due to its failure to make it clear that risky investments were just that, and the only Democrats at fault were those who voted for TARP.
Note however that the TARP vote was:
House - Democrats 172 for, 63 against. Republicans 108 for, 91 against.
Senate - Democrats 41 for, 11 against. Republicans 34 for, 14 against.
Also note that since Obama’s inauguration, there has not been a single securities fraud prosecution connected with the mortgage meltdown. In particular, the ratings agencies were crooked as corkscrews and richly deserved to be wearing orange.
Also also note that under Dodd-Frank the banking industry has gotten even more concentrated, has not lost its “too big to fail” status, and still holds trillions of dollars worth of overvalued real estate paper. (This problem is really never going to be solved until we allow all assets to reach their market clearing prices).
So while Bush (not Republicans in general) owns the start of the problem, Obama clearly owns the failure to do one damn thing to correct it.
