Whenever problems become large enough or important enough to attract national attention -- or at least the attention of the national press -- politicians are quick to assign blame on whomever or whatever they can identify as the cause. The urgency to identify and blame the culprits expands in direct proportion to the enormity of the problem. So it was in the immediate wake of the financial crisis of 2008. When Lehman Brothers collapsed under the weight of holding bad positions in a variety of financial instruments, and for similar reasons AIG would have suffered the same fate except for government intervention, the political class quickly determined that most of Lehman's and AIG's losses came as a result of activities in unregulated, over...

TAGS – Asia, North America