According to Machiavelli in The Prince, when bad things start happening to you, the cause is action by your enemy. The Republican Party has a lot of powerful enemies such as George Soros, Russia, Venezula, etc. and a lot of bad things happened to them during the last Presidential election. There was an electronic run on the US financial system just a McCain got the lead in the Presidential race. Could that be a coincidence? Maybe not. Here is an article that discusses what happened.

http://townhall.com/columnists/DianaWest/2009/02/12/who_attacked_our_economy_why_does_no_one_care?page=full&comments=true

Bush may have been interested in finding out who did it, but, I predict Obama has no interest in finding out who did it so we won't know who did it for a long time, if ever.

The system was vulnerable because of the Bush Administration's failure to realize that the "mark to market" accounting change that was made in the Fall of 2007 would cause a crash any time there was a disruption of the financial system. "Mark to Market" sounds good to conservatives, but is a disaster waiting to happen. When there is a disruption mark to market inherently causes a downward spiral. If no one will bid on a mortgage package, then mark to market requires that the package must be valued at zero, even though the underlying loans are performing, and the homes are clearly still worth something. Consider what happens during a hurricane. We do not allow people to charge exorbitant prices for water and gasoline. The same philosophy should prevail in the markets; why should we require that loans be considered as worthless because there is temporarily no buyer? Most bankers think that mark to market should not be used for mortgage loans. Changing that rule would pretty much end the current crisis. It is telling that the Obama Administration does not want to modify mark to market. That indicates to me that Obama does not want this crisis to end. It is too useful to him to in supporting his attempt to bring socialism to America.