Barry Ritholtz asks his readers what was the biggest mistake made by regulators during the financial crisis, he thinks that it was the Bear bailout, because it led banks to think that they were invincible, but he asks, “Was Lehman the biggest error? Fannie/Freddie Nationalization? Something else in entirely?”

I’ll go with something else entirely.

We should have let the festering pile of arrogance, ignorance, greed, and evil that was circling the bowl go under, and replace it with a taxpayer run lending facility for the rest of the economy.

We would have spend a lot less money than we have, there would have been more lending to the real economy, and the corrupt elites that got us into this mess would have been unseated, which, as Simon Johnson, former IMF chief economist, is what is really necessary in these cases, that these politically connected elites be broken.