Perhaps like no other person on this list, save another Goldman Sachs CEO, Robert Rubin, Jon Corzine exemplifies the incestuous coven that exists between the country’s political and financial elites.

Jim Cramer has two degrees from Harvard – neither of which would appear to have anything to do with even the most basic aspects of real economics.  According to Cramer’s crony capitalist version of economics, banks like Bear Stearns should enjoy the unique privilege of constant and ready access to cheap money from a central bank –…

Zoe Cruz started with Morgan Stanley in 1982 and was often profiled as one of the few female leaders on Wall Street.  (She is one of only four women on this list.  The other three – Kathleen Brown, Jamie Gorelick and Maxine Waters  – are all no-talent political hacks with no real, purely business connection to Wall Street or even…

In the typical “James Bond” movie, the villain’s attempt to start some doomsday machine is always thwarted – just in the nick of time – by James Bond.  Unfortunately life doesn’t always imitate art.  In the example provided by the housing bubble and ensuing financial crisis, no one was able to prevent Andrew Cuomo – aka Dr. No(-Talent…

As chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Donaldson authorized enormous changes to the “net capital rule.”  Whatever the rationale behind them, the changes to the net capital rule and the attendant reliance on a “risk-based” approach was an unmitigated disaster.   Of the five broker-dealers who qualified for the relaxed…

Essentially, Donovan – and all the other  the defenders of the GSEs and the affordable housing mandate in the crisis - are claiming that the actions of the most dominant companies in a market, Fannie and Freddie in the mortgage market, can’t affect the profitability or business practices of other companies in that same market.  A…

The institutional cronyism between the Federal Reserve and the largest Wall Street banks that Dudley is an obvious product of is not even Dudley’s largest contribution to the financial crisis.  Instead – and exactly like Charles Evans – Dudley’s largest role in bringing about the crisis is simple economic ignorance.  It is this…

Even among the Federal Reserve – which since 1971 has unleashed a devastating inflation on the United States - Evans is known as a monetary milquetoast or, more politely, an “inflation dove.”  His dovishness means he is willing to tolerate or at least run the risk of higher levels of inflation to ensure economic growth.

As stated in the preface to this list of “elites in name only,” the root cause of the financial crisis was a purely human factor; a completely unfounded belief among the academic, business and political elites of this country that they are, well, better than everyone else and immune from mistakes.  No individual on this list exemplifies…

The incongruity of a lawyer like Friedman running an investment bank like Goldman Sachs is not the issue here.  Instead, the issue is how someone with a law degree and experience as a securities lawyer could engage in the obvious conflict of interest that Friedman did.

The fact that Wall Street regulators like Tim Geithner were completely unconcerned about the enormous amount of short-term borrowing by Wall Street firms shows that the idiocy that sunk Lehman Brothers was running rampant up and down Wall Street and the Federal Reserve.  The mistakes made by Lehman Brothers and Richard Fuld were not unique…

While President of the New York Fed – his term lasted from November 2003 through January 2009 - Tim Geithner basically served as the Caspar Milquetoast of the financial crisis.  In particular, he completely shirked his considerable responsibilities as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and all sorts of speculative excess…

Goolsbee’s contribution to the financial crisis – like the numerous other MIT PhDs on this list – results from providing academic and intellectual bona fides to the speculative madness that was spawned by President Clinton’s housing central plan.  Unlike most other MIT PhDs on this list, Goolsbee had the bad sense to continue to endorse…

Even more so than Franklin Raines, her boss at Fannie Mae, Jamie Gorelick was a total neophyte in mortgage lending.  However, and like Raines, what she lacked in housing market experience she made up for with political connections.

Gorton provided the intellectual justification behind AIG’s trade in mortgage credit default swaps (CDS).  Due in no small part to Gorton’s almost complete misunderstanding of economics as well as his failure to distinguish between correlation and causation; AIG lost at least $60-billion in its CDS trades.  

The fact that Gramm’s beliefs were interpreted by the political and media establishments as being consistent with the “free market” speaks volumes about the colossal ignorance that animates discussions, particularly the discussion of economics, at the highest levels of this country.  As Phil Gramm’s record makes clear, while he was in…

Like Ben Bernanke – another chairman of the Federal Reserve – Greenspan’s role in helping to cause the crisis is so extensive that it is difficult to capture all his many blunders in a cogent, concise summary.  Instead, in the discussion here the focus will be on one blunder in particular – Greenspan cutting interest rates on October 15,…

As is the case with most PhDs in economics holding court, it isn’t too difficult to find the enormous fallacies in Kaplan’s apologia for business schools.   A review of the global economy over the past two decades reveals the single biggest reason for improved living standards in the world was not Ivy League educated MBAs.  Instead it…

Paul Krugman is one of the high priests of modern economic “thinking.”  He has a PhD from MIT, a column in the New York Times, a Nobel Prize and taught at Princeton.  As such, a review of his ideas is a proxy for a review of modern economic thought writ large.  The complete intellectual and moral bankruptcy of modern economic…

Just like Phil Gramm, the example of Art Laffer shows the enormous support the central planners at the Federal Reserve enjoy from all side of the political spectrum.

Instead of adopting a long view, Liesman has become the biggest shill and lackey for the Federal Reserve of the Greenspan/Bernanke era.

As dean of the Harvard Business School, Light could hardly remain silent in the aftermath of the financial crisis, fueled as it was by so many Ivy League graduates. Amazingly, and in spite of the huge numbers of Ivy League graduates at the core of the crisis, Light refused to even tacitly acknowledge any complicity in all the damage wrought by…

In a Congress full of them, Meeks was among the most useful of idiots.  

The best proof of Mishkin’s nearly complete technical incompetence and the ludicrousness of his theories on central banking are provided by his analysis of credit markets in Iceland.  

In fact, O’Neal leaving GM for Wall Street is the same mistake the US made as a country in microcosm.  The mistake being, the belief that real wealth was no longer the inevitable by-product of physical production; instead, wealth could be created out of thin air by Ivy League history majors trading pieces of paper with numbers printed on…

As disastrous as the changes to the net capital rule were, Paulson’s role in having these changes enacted is not Paulson’s largest contribution to the financial crisis.  Instead, Paulson’s largest contribution to the financial crisis was the influence he exerted over Wall Street pay practices.

Nevertheless, the example of Chuck Prince, and his ultimate decision to take on enormous amounts of risk even when he had doubts, shows how the credit bubble mania swept through Wall Street.  

Franklin Raines is Exhibit A for the morally bankrupt political culture that exists in this country.  Raines was President Clinton’s budget director.  In spite of little experience as a banker or in the mortgage industry, after leaving the Clinton White House Raines was named CEO of Fannie Mae, the largest mortgage bank in the world…

Perhaps best-selling author Nassim Nicolas Taleb best summed up Robert Rubin when he stated, "(Rubin) represents everything that is wrong with America.”

Rather than trying to more fully understand the Frankenstein’s monster he helped create, he has since started the “Masters in Financial Engineering” program at UC-Berkeley. He has dedicated his life to the creation of still more, even bigger financial monsters.  As it turned out, October 19, 1987 – as violent as it was - proved to be a…

The stupidity in this comment is basically biblical in scope.  Prof. Siegel cites stock valuations in 2006 - which were exclusively fueled by the housing bubble, only the largest financial bubble in history - to refute the notion that stocks weren’t overvalued when Greenspan gave his irrational exuberance speech.

Sullivan – who was well-liked wherever he worked and seemed to have an easy going nature – was too willing to defer and delegate to so-called experts.  The most fatal example of this deference to “experts” was Sullivan’s almost complete reliance on complicated financial models developed by Gary Gorton of Wharton.

The market for derivatives didn’t grow as large as it did by chance; it grew as large as it did because powerful people wanted the market for derivatives to grow.  Lawrence Summers in particular is a primary reason the derivative market became as large as it did.  

In this atmosphere of staggering losses and soon to be massive layoffs at both his company and industry wide, one of the first things John Thain did upon being hired as CEO of Merrill Lynch was to spend over $1-million to redecorate his office.  You can’t make this up.

Like Senator Kit Bond and her House colleagues Barney Frank and Gregory Meeks, Waters was among the most ardent defenders of Fannie Mae and its completely incompetent CEO, Franklin Raines.

The personification of the completely outsized influence the largest Wall Street banks have in the government and at the Federal Reserve.

Paul Willen is another in the long line of elite university educated people featured on this list whose benefits from their college education would appear to be limited to learning how to generate excuses and how to avoid accepting responsibility.

Most of the world’s economic elite consider him to be the most influential – and best - business writer today.  What he really is, is little more than Steve Liesman with a British accent; a tireless apologist and propagandist for the world’s central banks, investment banks, activists governments and elite university economics departments…