I really think this loan mess falls at the feet of the lenders far more than the borrowers who are just speeding down the highway.
Although people must be held to a high standard of personal responsibility, I have to agree with you here. The real culprit behind this is the MBS market and the trading of mortgages. Banks used to carry these risks themselves and had a vested interest in ensuring that they didn’t make bad loans. In the last decade, hot-potato mortgage trading has allowed banks to write bad loans with impunity knowing that they could dump the risk on someone else.