the end of CDS?

Can't help but notice that over the past few days there have been increasingly menacing articles about the role of Credit Default Swaps in the current crisis. Not to mention explicit "regulatory" investigations. My concern is that it won't be long until CDS - a vital form of debt insurance and a strong source of additional market information - are completely blackballed out of the system. And my suspicion - to be investigated and then expounded upon here at a later date - is that they had very little to do with the current crisis and that other factors like the Federal Reserve's undue expansion of credit and the government involvement with - peddling of - the subprime mortgage business has much more to do with what's led to this crisis.

Norm would want me to note here that the DJIA went down 777 points yesterday. Don't even know what to say except...we should all be scared. And a mixed economy is the most dangerous of all.