Financial Crisis-- Who gets the blame?

Ever since the beginning of 2009, the focus of most inquiry into the financial crisis has been on laying blame.  While most mainstream thought has focused on a range of factors, from deregulation/lax enforcement of existing regulations, to too much faith in the power of securitization to mitigate risk, to overly loose monetary policy on the part of Greenspan's Fed, to over-reliance on unrealistic risk models that led financial institutions to take too many risks, the political far right resorted to its go-to explanation: the government did it.  Now, in this case, finding a government agency to blame was especially hard, so they figured they would blame a financial crisis that started building in the early 2000's (though the seeds were probably planted in the late 70's) on a piece of legislation from 1977 (the Community Reinvestment Act) that encouraged banks to lend to minorities and the poor, as well as on a couple of public companies with implicit government guarantees on their debt in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Now, a paper published a few weeks ago by a couple of economists at the Fed more or less debunks that narrative, though there isn't enough data to make a conclusive statement.  Without getting into the technical details, what the study essentially does is an apples-to-apples comparison of loans conforming to the CRE guidelines, as well as the GSE's underwriting standards, and comparing their performance to loans to similar loans that would have not qualified.  The result (predictably) was that GSE and CRE-qualifying loans performed better than did non-qualifying loans.  The authors also run regressions to determine whether the existence of these guidelines contributed notably to the appreciation of home prices between 2001 and 2008 in a way that they would not have in the absence of the regulations.  Again, the result is pretty clear: the "government did it" narrative is a conclusion looking for evidence, and that evidence is scant.