A recent episode of This American Life attempted to assign blame for the recent financial collapse.  The different financial institutions who were cheating at their own game are somewhat to blame, as are the government regulators who didn't want to lose income from the companies they were supposed to be regulating.  Perhaps the biggest amount of blame was placed on the credit rating agencies who also didn't want to lose income from the companies whose assets they were rating.  This conversation with Tom Warrick from Standard and Poor's stood out to me: 

This American Life:  There are people who would say, you know, these were loans being [lent] out to people who didn't even have to prove they had jobs.  We had no data on how these loans were gonna perform.  How could you rate these things? 
Tom Warrick:  It's important to understand the riskier we believed the loan was, the more loss reserves needed to be incorporated into the transaction for us to rate a transaction triple-A. 
This American Life:  But there are people who would say you had no data to know what the real risk of those people defaulting was.  How could you go and rate something when you didn't have any data on how these loans were gonna perform. 
Tom Warrick:  Well we had lots of data.  We had years worth of data as to how borrowers perform over time. 
This American Life:  For these loans?  For people who didn't have to prove they had a job?  You had lots of data for that? 
Tom Warrick:  We are able to, through our analytical process, develop assumptions around what we believe the future will be like for these particular borrowers.

So there you have it.  Extremely powerful people who deal with more money than you can fathom tried to predict the future with their silly little equations.  And they were wrong.  I can't help but think it's kind of like a nuclear scientist accidentally creating and detonating an atomic bomb.  Whoops.  These guys lost at their own game.  It would be one thing if they were playing with Monopoly money or even the money belonging to high-stakes investors who could afford to lose it.  But no, they were using everyone's money.  And they f---ed up.  That's the end of it. 

The thing is, I'm not even really affected by this whole financial mess.  I still have a job (thank God), I still pay my mortgage, I still buy things.  Nothing has really changed.  But the whole thing kind of gets to me, and I think it's largely because (1) nobody wants to (or is able to) take the blame, and (2) it looks like the exact same thing will happen again sometime in the future unless we completely overhaul our entire financial system, which likely won't happen, which means we'll continue pushing it off so the next generation has to deal with it. #money