I was talking to my friend Michael today and he used a term to describe our mutual fear of a populist revolt against wall street and the financial sector: Financial McCarthyism

It got me thinking about the wisdom (or actually the lack of wisdom) in making wall street and the investors and executives that inhabit it the scapegoats of this financial mess we are in.

Yes, a lot of people in the financial industry made a lot of bad bets, were paid excessive sums for making those bad bets, and are at least partly to blame for the mess we are in.

But there's plenty of blame to go around; the politicians who created the political environment for the housing bubble, the regulators who didn't regulate, the borrowers who didn't think about the ramifications of paying too much and borrowing too much, and I could go on and on.

Not all of us are complicit in the making of this mess but certainly a lot of us are.

And the thing that concerns me is we need our financial system to get us out of this mess.

The people who built the house of cards are the ones who know how to take it