The root cause was indeed yellow streak Brown !

Its about time somebody rectified Labour's gross spending of taxpayer cash!
Placing all the blame at the door of the banks is short sighted. I am not defending them but of greater concern is the appalling state of the nation's finances going in to the recession which meant that we piled on debt and unsustainable spending at a governmental level even during growth years. The bankers are simply the symptom of the disease, not the cause.
The root cause was indeed yellow streak Brown and only yellow streak Brown, when he handed over control of interest rates to the Bank of England, in return for a total deregulation of the entire financial system - all on day one of the Labour government in 1997.
When there are no longer any rules, any kind of immoral act can be justified, and that is exactly what has happened.
Former Labour city minister Lord Myners, who said that there was considerable waste in public expenditure. "There is nothing progressive about a government that consistently spends more than it can raise in taxation, and certainly nothing progressive that endows generations to come with the liabilities incurred with respect to the current generation," Myners said, accusing the previous government of flawed thinking on employment. "The government can create the environment conducive to the creation of jobs, but it cannot create jobs, and we mislead ourselves if we believe it can."
Lord Myners has come out now and that leaves just the moronic left and the slightly mad in the Labour in denial now.
Instead of redistributing income in favour of the poor according to their Socialist credo, yellow streak Brown actually re distributed income in favour of the money lenders. Thank you for putting the UK in ball and chains yellow streak, its going to be a very long hard sentence for us all!