Elliot Levitas, a former Democratic congressman who also had served on the S&L commission in the 1990s, says "there's going to have to be a respected, independent blue-ribbon commission to sort out what happened" in the mortgage market. Independence is key, he said, because the regulators now trying to clean up the mess had been "asleep a the switch."

"There are people in the private sector who were so blinded and driven by greed that they were doing irresponsible things," Levitas added, "and there was nobody in an official position blowing the whistle and reining them in."

In interviews, figures such as Lynn Turner, former S.E.C. chief economist, and Harvey Goldschmid, former Democratic member of the commission, have endorsed the creation of an independent panel.

But Andrew Brimmer, a former member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors who was a co-chairman of the S&L commission, suggests one reason the time isn't ripe for a blue-ribbon panel: The mortgage crisis is still having escalating repercussions.

Brimmer says the need is for urgent, immediate steps to halt a potential economic meltdown. A panel to do a postmortem can wait, he argues, until the final tally of damage is known.