Being proved right when no-one would listen is usually intensely satisfying.  Having spent much of the past three or four years warning that mortgage lending was out of control and banks and homeowners were getting in over their heads, it would be easy for Shelter to take some satisfaction at the news of the ruinous losses at HBOS and co.

But the story of Cassandra is a tragedy, not a fairy-tale.  And there is something not very edifying about the parading of Fred Goodwin and colleagues in front of a Parliamentary Committee like dissidents in some Stalinist or Maoist show-trial.

In the end, the truth is that the desire to blame this whole mess on the actions of a few key individuals hides the bitter reality that the causes are far wider that that, and that responsibility sits with all of us (or nearly all of us).  Yes, of course the senior managers at HBOS – and Northern Rock, and Bradford and Bingley – acted irresponsibly.  If the stories about James Crosby are true, it looks like there was a cultural resistance to heed warnings and question judgements.  And our political representatives were pushing them to do more, invent more products to feed the mortgage beast.

But we, the public, are also to blame.  No-one forced those loans on us; no-one compelled us to go for 125% loan-to-value offers or multiples of eight times our (self-certificated) income.  We were there too, tripping over each other to get a bit of the action.  Buy a house; get wealthy.  If it has all come crashing down, we cannot slough off our share of the guilt by scapegoating some rich men in suits.

And there are dangers if we do.  On the other side of the world, Australians are seemingly stampeding to identify the enemy within, put names to the mass murderers who lit the fires which have devastated so many lives.  If there are guilty men (and if we manage to catch the right ones), they should be punished.  But just focussing our anger on a few individuals means that we never reflect on how the blazes spread so far and so fast, and what we need to do to prevent a similar firestorm in the future.