The only applause line Gretchen Morgenson got during her presentation to the Economic Club of Memphis came during a question-and-answer session at the end.

Morgenson, a columnist and assistant business editor for The New York Times, spoke to the club Thursday, Nov. 17, in the Tower Room atop Clark Tower. She’s recently published a book on the financial crisis, “Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon.”

So, naturally, the case she makes in her book is what she also spent most of her time talking about Thursday night. After her focus on things like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, housing finance and too-big-to-fail banks, though – much of which she skewers every Sunday in her New York Times column – she got around to the Occupy Wall Street protest movement.

“I think they got their location wrong,” she told the economic club, a crowd that includes many of the city’s business elite. “It should be Occupy Washington.”

Morgenson said some people told her Thursday night it was almost mandatory to take blood-pressure medication before reading her book. Which was all the more interesting to her, considering her efforts to get it published a few years ago.

Despite being told the idea was solid – she wanted “to start an honest dialogue about housing finance in this country” – she kept getting a similar response from publishers. By the time your book comes out, publishers told her, the economy will be roaring again, and no one will care about the origins of the financial collapse anymore.

“I smile when I think about those reactions,” she said.

In an effort to bring fresh analysis to the causes of the meltdown, one of the things she didn’t want to do in her book is mimic what she believes is the shortcoming of other similarly themed books. She said some of them have taken the tack that because everyone had a hand in the collapse it was everybody’s fault – so it ends up being nobody’s fault. At least, nobody in particular.

“This was not an act of God,” she said, dismissing the idea that the economic collapse was an unavoidable congruence of factors similar to a major storm or weather event. “This was a failure of human beings.”

She talked about the evolution of Fannie and Freddie from “sleepy” utility-like entities to powerful political machines that made sure at all costs that their government subsidy was never touched. She lamented what happens “when Washington, in its infinite wisdom, decides that every living, breathing citizen deserves to own a home.”

And she lamented the fact that three years after the height of the economic crisis, virtually no one has gone to jail as a result.

After that focus on accountability in her remarks, one of the questions submitted on notecards from the audience revisited it. Someone asked if she thought former U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd and current U.S. Rep. Barney Frank – the Democratic namesakes of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation – deserved to be held to account for their role in the crisis.

That got some chuckles from the room. Morgenson conceded there are plenty of “glaring omissions” in Dodd-Frank that leave many of the current problems unaddressed.