1… Angelo Mozilo 
The son of a butcher, Mozilo co-founded Countrywide in 1969 and built it into the largest mortgage lender in the U.S. Countrywide wasn’t the first to offer exotic mortgages to iffy borrowers, but it popularized such products. In the wake of the housing bust, which toppled Countrywide, Mozilo’s lavish pay package was excoriated by critics. He left Countrywide last summer after its sale to Bank of America, which later pledged to pay $8.7 billion to settle predatory-lending charges filed against Countrywide filed by 11 state attorneys general.
2… Phil Gramm
As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee from 1995 through 2000, Gramm was Washington’s outspoken champion of deregulation. And he got it, by playing a lead role in the writing and passage of the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated commercial banks from Wall Street. Then he inserted a provision into the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that exempted derivatives like credit-default swaps from regulation.
3… Alan Greenspan
He was the one who could have stopped it. As Federal Reserve chairman, Greenspan deftly managed the 1987 stock-market crash and presided over the 1990s economic boom, cementing his status as Washington’s money wizard. But the low interest rates he sired in the early 2000s and his long-standing disdain for regulation underpinned the mortgage crisis. The maestro admitted in an October congressional hearing that he had "made a mistake in presuming" that financial firms could regulate themselves.
4… Chris Cox
The ex-SEC chief’s blindness to repeated allegations of fraud in the Madoff scandal is mind-blowing, but it’s his lax enforcement that lands him on this list. Cox says his agency lacked authority to limit the massive leveraging that led to the financial collapse. In truth, the SEC had plenty of power to rein in risky behavior by such investment banks as Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, but it chose not to. Cox oversaw the dwindling SEC staff and a sharp drop in action against some traders. We could have used more.
5… American Consumers 
We really enjoyed living beyond our means. No wonder we wanted to believe it would never end. But the bill is due. Household debt in the U.S. — the money we owe as individuals — zoomed to more than 130% of income in 2007, up from about 60% in 1982. We’ve been borrowing, borrowing, borrowing — living off and believing in the wealth effect, first in stocks, which ended badly, then in real estate, which has ended even worse. Now we’re out of bubbles. We have a lot less wealth — and a lot more effect.
6… Hank Paulson 
When Paulson left the top job at Goldman Sachs to become Treasury Secretary in 2006, his big concern was whether he’d have an impact. Careful what you wish for. He almost single-handedly ran economic policy for the last year of the Bush Administration. Impact? You bet. Positive? Not yet. Paulson was too late in battling the crisis, and letting Lehman fail was a pivotal mistake that rapidly eroded confidence. His attempt to fix the problem — a bailout that netted $700 billion from Congress — has been a wasteful mess.
7… Joe Cassano 
Before the meltdown, few people had ever heard of credit-default swaps. They are insurance contracts — or, if you prefer, wagers — that a company will pay its debt. As a founding member of AIG’s financial-products unit, Cassano knew them cold. In good times, AIG’s massive CDS-issuance business minted money by essentially writing insurance against a financial Katrina. What were the odds? Those contracts were at the heart of AIG’s downfall. So far, the U.S. has invested and lent $150 billion to keep AIG afloat.
8… Ian McCarthy 
As CEO of Beazer Homes since 1994, McCarthy has become something of a poster child for worst builder behaviors. In 2007 the Charlotte Observer highlighted Beazer’s aggressive sales tactics, including lying about borrowers’ qualifications to help them get loans. The company has admitted that its mortgage unit violated regulations — like down-payment-assistance rules — at least as far back as 2000. It is cooperating with federal investigators.
9…Frank Raines 
Raines was at the helm of Fannie Mae, the bastard offspring of politics and finance, when things really went off course. A former Clinton Administration Budget Director, Raines took over as CEO of Fannie in 1999. He left in 2004 with the company embroiled in an accounting scandal just as it was making big investments in the subprime mortgage securities that would later sour. Last year Fannie and rival Freddie Mac became wards of the state.
Enough of these greedy, irresponsible, rotten bastards.
There are sixteen more of them here
