Columnist: Congressional liberals fueled Wall Street collapse

Everyone is looking for answers. The American people want to know who is responsible for the financial collapse that will end up costing taxpayers billions.

Stan Liebowitz, an economics professor at the University of Texas, lays out a case that it was liberals in Congress who opened the way for the financial scandals that have rocked the foundation of the U.S. economy.

From an op-ed, "House of Cards," published in The New York Post by Liebowitz:

Now that the popped bubble has left us swimming in foreclosures, the supporters of loosened credit standards seem shy about taking credit for their "mortgage innovations." Instead, they blame subprime lenders for becoming "predatory" - when they were simply taking the Boston Fed rules to their logical conclusion while broadening the mortgage market.

Investors holding mortgage-based assets now want out. Perhaps they deserve a $700 billion refund - since they were sold a bill of goods by "progressive" politicians, academics and government officials who, in the hope of remaking society, insisted that loans based on relaxed underwriting standards were sound.

Read the full column at the newspaper's Web site.