This is merely political spin that nobody is seriously buying. The game's up. The excesses absolutely rampant in an unregulated, financial industry (and in business in general) is the cause of almost all of this mess. Using unsecured real estate paper en masse in a shell game to leverage extremely unethical, naked derivatves bets was a wonderful game while it worked, and banks and the slimy MBAs who run them lived high for a while, then parachuted out rich.
Masters of the universe, I think they called themselves, right?
Republicans have had eight years, six of those with both the presidency and more of those years prior to 2000 in control of the legislature It was profitable to them and theirs to deregulate, and they did it with a vengeance. Now many of the fundamental flaws of unregulated capitalism return to roost for the thousandth time. Capitalism doesn't really allow for the simple truths that we are all interconnected, what harms you almost always comes back to harm me, and bad decisions eventually harm all of us. And here we are, watching credit dry up and the DOW plummet again on a Friday afternoon, looking downstream at a horrible impact on an entire generation of young people, brought about by the greed of a few.
Cooperation, codified via sensible regulation, is always a higher good than competition.