Originally Posted by vsex

1/2 right and 1/2 wrong. Wall Street did cause this (Read "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis or "House of Cards" by William Cohan) along with the fools that bought a $700,000 home, no money down on stated docs when they didn't have the resources to pay for it.

Mortgage companies would not have been doing predatory lending and offering idiots houses they couldn't afford if Wall Street hadn't found a way to package and sell these subprime mortgages as AAA rated credit default swaps and bullshit investors (with the help of Moody's etc.) into buying them. They created such a demand by lying about them, that it caused a greed rush.