Michael Appleton for The New York Times  From left, former mayors Edward I. Koch and David N. Dinkins, along with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, on a panel with Charlie Rose on Tuesday.  But for his predecessor, former Mayor Edward I. Koch, looking toward the future is not enough — someone should pay.  The two men, who generally have a cordial relationship, found themselves at odds on Tuesday morning when asked to respond to the concerns expressed by the Occupy Wall Street protesters, who have criticized the nation’s largest financial institutions.  “It’s fun and it’s cathartic — it’s, I don’t know, it’s entertaining to go and to blame people,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a breakfast to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Association for a Better New York, a business and civic group. But, he said to applause, it “doesn’t get better by complaining about it; it doesn’t get better by disrupting commerce; it doesn’t get better by vilifying people and scaring them away from taking risks.”  Mr. Koch took a sharply different view. “There’s something wrong with a kid who steals a bike going to jail and someone who steals millions paying a fine,” he said, also to applause from the large audience of business leaders, elected officials and others gathered in a ballroom at the Hilton New York in Midtown Manhattan. Both men were joined on the panel by former Mayor David N. Dinkins. (Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani was invited to participate but said he had to be in California.)  The exchange offered a window into competing views about the value of assigning blame and attaching consequences for a crisis that has led to widespread unemployment and loss of wealth.  Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire and political independent with deep ties to the financial industry, expressed more unambiguously than ever before his view that Congress, rather than the banks, was responsible for the mortgage crisis.  “It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis,” the mayor said. “It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and to give mortgages to people who were on the cusp.” It was Congress, he continued, that “pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent; they were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody.”  And now, Mr. Bloomberg added, “we want to go vilify the banks, because it’s one target.”  “It’s easy to blame them, and Congress certainly isn’t going to blame themselves.”  The view Mr. Bloomberg articulated — the mainstream Republican explanation for the subprime mortgage crisis — is disputed by Democrats and many economists. They argue that even if federal policy may have partly contributed to the crisis by lowering standards for some mortgages, Wall Street broadened and exacerbated it by bundling high-risk loans and labeling them safe investments, thus spreading the financial danger throughout the global financial system.  Mr. Bloomberg also argued that the protests were not constructive. “I hear your complaints,” he said, adding, “Some of them are totally unfounded.”  Rather than complaining, he said, the protesters “should be out there trying to change the world and make it better.”  “And that’s what we’re trying to do in this city,” he continued, “and that’s what people in this room are fundamentally trying to do.”  Mr. Koch, a Democrat, praised Mr. Bloomberg’s business acumen but said he differed with him on the question of the financial crisis and the protests.  “I’m Jewish, not Catholic, but I believe in punishment,” he said.  Referring to the settlements paid by Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to resolve claims by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Koch said they were just “the cost of doing business” in the view of the banks.  “What do you think they got fined for — schmutz on the sidewalk?” Mr. Koch said. “They got fined because they abused their relationship with their clientele. And I want to see somebody — I want to see one of them, of a major corporation, punished criminally.”  Over scattered applause, he added: “They beggared the people in this country. More than $2 trillion was lost in the great recession.”  Mr. Dinkins, a Democrat, declined to engage in the debate. “I have to tell you that constantly I read diverse opinions about fiscal matters, and I say to myself: ‘Now, they all went to Harvard or Wharton or wherever — the same schools, read the same books, listened to the same lecturers, and their opinions diverge. So what the hell do I know?’ ”
At an event, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg blamed Congress for the mortgage crisis, while former Mayor Edward I. Koch said Wall Street should be punished for the nationâs fiscal woes.