By David Bogoslaw with Ben Steverman, John Cady, and Will Andrews

The Faces Behind the Crisis

No one gets out of bed in the morning and says: "I think I'll start a financial crisis today." The people who played key roles in the business practices, decisions, actions, and omissions that fueled the financial-system meltdown likely had good reasons for what they did, or didn't do. And it's not always possible to anticipate the broader impact of an action or policy beyond one's own sphere of responsibility. But the crisis is here, regardless, and it's the confluence of these factors, large and small, that created the dreadful tsunami that engulfed world markets in the autumn of 2008.

Here, BusinessWeek presents some of the individuals whose decisions, in the eyes of their critics, laid the groundwork for the financial meltdown: