Who's to blame? Not me, that's for sure

I love the Financial Times. Like every other player in the current global financial fiasco (do I mean fiasco? How about another word beginning with f, ending in -up?), they of course are not to blame. Some words from today's edition, from Gillian Tett, their capital markets editor:

For this package suggests that British mandarins have finally learnt to draw sensible lessons from the past...

How foolish of those silly 'mandarins' - to have listened to the FT for the last few decades, constantly telling these silly old bureaucrats how absurd they were to attempt to control the markets! I wouldn't be surprised to hear someone from Goldman Sachs or RBS telling us that it's my mother's fault next.

And no sooner do I write these word sand start reading the very next story in the FT - and I discover that yes, it was all our own fault! Apparently we should have seen through the mass hysteria drummed up by the financial services, the mass mis-selling, the outright lies, the bland reassurances that the bull market was forever, the obvious confidence our benighted governments showed in markets!

Well, all right I confess, I dunnit. And I would like 1973 crash, the 1987 crash and the Fall of the Roman Empire taken into account too.