Is it the clarinet-playing Alan Greenspan, formerly of the Federal Reserve, who believed in the invisible self-correcting mechanisms of free markets?

Or is it Richard Fuld at Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc., who leveraged his investment bank to the hilt?

Or Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox, who seemed disengaged from Wall Street as the global markets burned?

Or the two hedge fund guys from the Bear Stearns Cos. Inc., Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, who were indicted this summer on charges that included conspiracy, securities fraud, wire fraud and insider trading?

They and countless others are to blame, economists said last week, for the financial system's careering wildly off track in the housing boom. The nation's system has, in effect, overrun a 1930s regulatory framework and will have to be modernized.

"We've met the enemy, and he is us," said Robert Dye, senior economist with PNC Financial Services Group. "There is no one person who had enough individual power to create this problem."

In what seems like a New York minute, an intractable housing slump has morphed into the mother of economic turmoils. Credit markets have seized up, and the potential for soaring unemployment, on the scale of the double-dip recession of the early 1980s, motivated the U.S. House to pass the bailout Friday after rejecting it Monday.

So far, the nation has lost 760,000 jobs this year, including 159,000 in September. Two economists, one of them R. Glenn Hubbard, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, warned that homeowners were staggering under the loss of $565 billion in home-equity values.

Yet, the economic calamity has had one missing element: an iconic villain along the lines of Michael Milken, who became the face of junk bonds in the 1980s, or Kenneth Lay, who personified the Enron Corp. scam.

The voters seem to hunger for one, or more. They dialed Washington with phone calls by the thousands opposing the bailout.

The FBI is searching for wrongdoers with 26 bureau investigations of institutions tied to the mortgage debacle, according to two sources familiar with the developments.

In June, as part of law enforcement investigations, Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, two senior managers of failed Bear Stearns hedge funds, were indicted. They have denied the charges, and their case is pending.

The SEC has opened 50 investigations into disclosure and valuation of housing-related investments at banks, insurers and credit-rating agencies, Cox told the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee last week.

But the simple fact is that many who pushed the limits, or bent the rules, will not likely be punished. It was part of the business at the time.

"It's built into our psyche. We are greedy, and we are not above being deceitful when making money. And we are overly optimistic when it comes to finances," said William Stull, chairman of the economics department at Temple University. "We are herd animals. We get into panics, and everybody does the same thing at the same time."

Some deserve more blame than others. For decades, elected and appointed leaders have broadly deregulated the financial system. Former Fed Chairman Greenspan, who took the helm of the central bank in 1987, was one of biggest proponents. The central bank failed to issue, until this year, final mortgage regulations under a 1994 law.

Greenspan said he believed, in general, that regulations were unnecessary because buyers of mortgage securities - high-paid investment advisers and analysts - would make sure those mortgage securities were of high quality.

They didn't.

Other deregulation supporters included former President Bill Clinton, who aggressively promoted homeownership to lower-income and minority buyers in the 1990s. This led to a loosening of loan standards.