... is to own one."
That is the title of a book by William K. Black, an expert in banking and financial regulation. He says that fraud is at the heart of the current financial crisis because bank executives knowingly sold high risk loans with assurances that they had no risk at all. He also blames certain members of Congress over the past 10 years of colluding with the fraud, not only by not passing laws to regulate what are now troubled assets, but in fact, by passing laws that prohibited anyone from regulating them. His big concern now is that both the Bush and Obama Administrations are allowing the same people who caused the crisis to remain in their jobs at the head of failed banks, and that things will not improve until those people are replaced.
See the video of the interview here --
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/watch.html.