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I have an academic topic/project that has been assigned. If anyone could provide assistance in guidance it would be much appreciated. I realize there are political/lobbying concerns, but this issue specifies accounting errors and remedies. Any thoughts? The assignment is: "What role did the Accounting profession play in the recent sub prime mortgage crisis? What could they have done differently?"

Mortgage delinquencies hit a record in the second quarter, with a sharp drop in subprime loans being offset by a surge in prime fixed-rate loans, the MBA said.

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents. "Expect fallout, expect foreclosures, expect horror stories," California mortgage lender Paris Welch wrote to U.S. regulators in January 2006, about one year before the housing implosion cost her a job. Bowing to aggressive lobbying — along with assurances from banks that the troubled mortgages were OK — regulators delayed action...

When the bank bailout bill was adopted recently, I said that one of the worst features was the virtually dictatorial power that was granted to the Secretary of the Treasury. He gets to make decisions about who will survive and who will fail and other broad discretionary decisions about the economy that cannot be challenged. That's virtual dictatorship over the financial markets. A few days ago, Paulson sent forms to nine major banks giving the government permission to buy shares in the banks, effectively nationalizing them. The Treasury Department then ordered the banks to accept this deal, even though at...