And if you understood who to hold accountable, you would.

Krugman --Yay! No pay wall!--this morning:

How bad is it? Well, I’ve never seen financial insiders this spooked — not even during the Asian crisis of 1997-98, when economic dominoes seemed to be falling all around the world.

This time, market players seem truly horrified — because they’ve suddenly realized that they don’t understand the complex financial system they created.

Yeah, you see that word "complex" a lot in Big Shitpile coverage. Another phrase to watch for: "Financial innovation"*:

But what has really undermined trust is the fact that nobody knows where the financial toxic waste is buried. Citigroup wasn’t supposed to have tens of billions of dollars in subprime exposure; it did. Florida’s Local Government Investment Pool, which acts as a bank for the state’s school districts, was supposed to be risk-free; it wasn’t (and now schools don’t have the money to pay teachers).

How did things get so opaque? The answer is “financial innovation” — two words that should, from now on, strike fear into investors’ hearts.

What who's responsible for that? Why, the people who've been looting running the country for the last thirty years: The Conservative Movement:

Why was this allowed to happen? At a deep level, I believe that the problem was ideological: policy makers, committed to the view that the market is always right, simply ignored the warning signs. We know, in particular, that Alan Greenspan brushed aside warnings from Edward Gramlich, who was a member of the Federal Reserve Board, about a potential subprime crisis.

And free-market orthodoxy dies hard. Just a few weeks ago Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, admitted to Fortune magazine that financial innovation got ahead of regulation — but added, “I don’t think we’d want it the other way around.” Is that your final answer, Mr. Secretary?

But don't cry for the financiers and the rich fucks. They've got theirs, and the smart ones got left holding the back. And who's going to pay? In the immortal words of Louis Armstrong:

If you have to ask, you don't know.

NOTE Hat tip to Bill Gates for marketing Microsoft's "fast follower" strategy for maintaining its monopoly as "innovation." Which is was; just not technical innovation.