Sure, lots of things were involved in the damage. In a hurricane, stuff flying around in the whirlwind gets smashed into other things in the whirlwind and on the ground. But it's the energy of the hurricane that picks up the objects and slams them into one another. And it's climate change that causes the hurricane!

Republicans want to point to Fannie Mae and loosened lending requirements in those agencies as the culprit, because that distracts from the other causes Democrats keep pointing to, such as lack of regulatory restraint on securitization -- and the behavior of non-insurers providing "insurance" in counterparty transactions that induced a "no risk" euphoria. And CDS's and multi-tranche stripped and shuffled bundled MBS's, and tranched bundles of multi-tranche stripped and bundled MBS bundles, and resecuritization of resecuritized securities, and corrupted rating agencies...

I submit all these things were flying objects that indeed smashed into each other and everything on the ground too. But the whirlwind was something more elemental. It was human beings losing their senses (once again, as they always do, in every age and era) and being either delusional stupid enough to believe what they saw was sustainable, or simply determined to ride the merry-go-round until just the last minute (in other words, delusional stupid). They do it because others are doing it. The more others do it the more they do it. Like a vortex feeding on itself, it builds and builds... until there is no more energy input, and everything comes crashing to the ground.

Maybe the simplest way to put it is: at some point, the system changed over from charging fees to pay the cost of assembling capital to make investments, to creating "investments" as entirely an excuse to generate a stream of fees. A stream that had to increase exponentially to stay in flux. In the former case, the mindset is you pay the fees to own and keep the investments. In the latter case, the mindset is, the hell with owning investments, it's the transaction stream that we are after.

Of course it became a red queen's race to find enough investments to sustain the stream of transaction payments. So to keep the pipeline full of projects, everyone had to get more and more corrupt -- brokers find more and more suckers ("borrowers"), rating agencies finding more and more AAA's, developers getting more projects underway. That's when a windy overheated economy did its phase transition into a category 5 disaster.

Show me the Republican who wasn't cheering this on as an example of the glorious vigor of capitalism and I'll show you a man who when it was all over wasn't saying no one could have seen it coming.