Who? Who?

Time Magazine, seeking salvation in the realm of glitzy packaging, has a cute feature up on "25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis." And just as the marketers must have hoped, here I am writing about it.

First thing to note- the number of names you don't even recognize. Okay, you've read stories about Angelo Mozilo, Joe Casssano, Ian McCarthy, Jimmy Cayne et al (trust me, you have). But I doubt that any but the most obsessive meltdown junky could score more than 50 percent in associating the malefactor with the malefaction. Might be better to do it backwards, Jeopardy style ("I'll take international criminal masterminds for $200, Alex!"). Then if Alex poses the puzzler "he said 'The consumer has to be an idiot to take on those loans, but it has been one of our best-­performing investments,'" you'd press your button and reply"who is John Devaney?"

But then (as the marketers intended?) the Monday-morning quarterbacking will begin. Does George Bush belong on this list more than Bill Clinton? And where is Jimmy Carter, godfather of the Community Reinvestment Act, beloved villain of the Wall Street Journal? Indeed, strong evidence that this list was put together by Time and not the Journal is that it includes neither Carter nor another favorite Journal boogieman, Congressman Barney Frank (the list does include the very favorite Journal bugaboo, Franklin Raines, late of FNMA).

Indeed, I'm a bit surprised to see who comes top in the rankings: not Bush or Clinton, not Dick Fuld, not Stan O'Neal, not Angelo Mazilo, but Mr. Cuddly himself, Phil ("Bunch of Whiners") Gramm. I'm certainly not going to feel sorry for Gramm, but given the competition, his villainy may be overrated. Give Gramm this: he's got a brain the size of a suitcase, and he's nothing if not candid--he has never for a moment made any secret of the fact that his role is to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. He's the kind of guy who will never stab you in the back because he is too busy stabbing you in the front, and if you are taken in by him, why I'd say you have only yourself to blame.

I have far more equivocal feelings about Chris Cox from the SEC, number two on the list who, by all accounts, is a rather nice and well intentioned man. In another time, I might even have said "a smart man," but everything you read about Cox lately suggests that he found the SEC job much more difficult, perplexing and generally nastier than he ever suspected ("not Pooh corner," an early commentator warned).

I would take wonkish exception to the inclusion of Lew Ranieri, identified by Time with only mild exaggeration of the mortgage-backed bond. I'm still enough of a troglodyte that I believe in some of these fancy dancy financial devices: I believe that securitizations don't kill people, people kill people, and you shouldn't blame Ranieri for the fact that other people turned his ideas into junk. Follow down that road and you wind up laying the blame on this guy, said by Aristotle to be the all time granddaddy of funny-money securities.

Afterthought: coming in at number 10 is one guy who strikes me as clearly not responsible for the financial crisis. That would be our beloved friend Bernie Madoff, author of perhaps the biggest financial fraud of all time but still, ironically, more victim than perpetrator of the currrent collapse.

Pedantic Footnote: "Who who?" is supposed to be a joke. Go here.