Where should we put the blame for the global economic crisis?

According to this week's Economist:

The deep causes of the financial crisis lie in global imbalances—mainly, America’s huge current-account deficit and China’s huge surplus

The article begins:

ASK people what caused the financial and economic crisis and most are likely to plump for some mix of greed and incompetence. Bank bosses have been castigated for fee-seeking gluttony, reckless lending and failure to heed the risks to their institutions. Regulators have been accused of sleeping on watch. Central bankers once lionised for mastering inflation and the business cycle are feted no longer.

Few among the public would be likely to pin the blame on “global imbalances”: the pattern of large, persistent current-account deficits in America and, to a lesser extent, Britain and some other rich economies, matched by surpluses in emerging markets, notably China.

Comment: The United States Government has been willing to finance two wars by borrowing money from abroad. It has stood by for decades as the public was encouraged to accumulate more and more debt on the credit cards, in their mortgages, etc.

We the public have let the government get away with that kind of mismanagement. Indeed we have let the government get away with abdicating its role of regulator of financial institutions and markets. It surely seems to me that we have done so out of greed. Thus I see greed and mismanagement as fundamental to the imbalances in international financial flows. JAD