Finally a little focus on our regulatory failures

via The Housing Bubble Blog.

The reason that we had a housing bubble in the Greenspan years, that this didn't happen before, is that from the end of the (previous) Great Depression to the end of the 20th Century, we had a Federal Government.

``It's really speaking to the lack of good supervision by the SEC,'' said David Hendler, an analyst at CreditSights Inc. in New York. ``They're not really a real regulator staying on top of things.''
...
The SEC and the Fed ``are both equally guilty on regulatory blame for being asleep at the switch,'' said Anthony Sabino, a business-law professor at St. John's University in New York and head of Sabino & Sabino, a securities litigation firm.

The article also mentions the Treasury Department and "the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the private regulator that oversees U.S. brokerages," but not as aggressively as I think is warranted.