This is pretty weak journalism. First, the $60T value that they cite for CDS is a notional value, not an actual value. The actual value of the CDS is but a fraction of that. Second, they act like the MBS created themselves out of thin air. Surely the individuals who took out ridiculous mortgages (either as speculators, over-leveraged individuals hoping to profit from the real estate market, or those who drained their home equity to buy flat screen TVs or go on vacation) are complicit in this mess. If people had stopped to think, maybe I shouldn't get a mortgage that is 10x my annual income, or maybe I shouldn't sign up for monthly payments that are 50% of my take home pay, there would not have been bad loans filling up the MBS. Not to mention - why were the buyers of MBS asleep at the wheel? Joe Sixpack couldn't buy MBS even if he had known what they were - these were the domain of banks, hedge funds, and pension plans, who pay their staffs big bucks because they are supposed to be financial experts. If they failed to do proper due diligence before putting their funds at risk, they have no one to blame but themselves. The fact that S&P/Moody's rated these things is convenient but that doesn't excuse investors from doing a sanity check. And this doesn't even get into Greenspan who kept rates way too low for too long once a housing bubble was apparent, or congress who kept pushing Fannie and Freddie into riskier sectors of the mortgage market.
Don't get me wrong, the CEOs of firms involved with these products deserve blame for this mess, but they are by no means the only ones who shirked their responsibility.