I don't have time to look up those links about the reasons for the Wall Street crisis. But I agree that the question is not so simple that it can be reduced to a question of Republicans versus Democrats. The problem is not so much who did something, but what was done.

A couple of days ago in my own local newspaper, there was an interview with somebody who talked about the present financial crisis. I don't remember who it was, or even whether he was Swedish or, say, American. But to me, the interesting thing was what he said. According to this man, bubbles and crashes are what you are going to have in a deregulated economy.

This man said that after the Western economies recovered after the crash of 1929, politicians and bankers agreed that a similar scenario must not be allowed to happen again. The solution was tight regulation. And because these regulations worked so well, there were no more crashes until the Savings and Loans crash in the 1980s. But by then, the banking sector had been deregulated. I very recently googled the S&L crash, and according to Wikipedia the roots of that crash could be traced back to Jimmy Carter in the late seventies, since he was the one who started deregulating the banks. And after that there have been three bubbles and crashes: the S&L bubble-and-crash, the IT bubble-and-crash, and now, the housing, mortgage and subprime bubble-and-crash.

So let's not talk about Democrats and Republicans, or at least, let's not say that Democrats have always been die-hard regulators. That's not a fair description of them at all. Let's talk about regulation and deregulation instead. There were no really severe or dangerous financial fluctuations during that long period of the twentieth century when banks were tightly regulated. But those regulations began to be lifted by Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s, and since then we have had one crash per decade: one in the eighties, one in the nineties and one in the 'noughties', as the British jokingly say.

So in hindsight it would seem that deregulation was the culprit, not primarily Democrats of Republicans.

Ann