I have a hard time deciding whether to be angry at the jerks who let this happen (but isn't that all of us?)
That may well be the problem, too many people to blame. Righteous indignation needs a good villain but our crowd of culprits is too vast:
1) Home buyers: Who borrowed more then they should (some of them lying on loan applications to do it) to buy houses they thought would only go up in value
2) Mortgage brokers/lenders: Who downplayed risky loans and convinced people they could really buy more house then they could afford . . . "did you know houses only go up in value? They aren't making any more land, you know?"
3) Investment Banks: Who, as always, pushed innovation (in this case securitization) to its breaking point (folks really should have know the gig was up once they started peddling securitizations of securitizations).
4) Rating agencies: Who improperly assessed the risk of Wall Street's new innovations giving them the appearance of a free lunch.
5) Institutional Fixed Income investors: Who in their greed for yield were all too willing to buy the free lunch Wall Street was selling.
6) Democratic Politicians: Who pushed commercial banks hard to "not discriminate against low income borrowers" . . . now also known as "sub-prime"
7) Republican Politicians: Who believed the market could and would regulate it self.
8) FASB (the accountants): Who force companies to mark their investments to market even when there is no market that accurately reflects the securities fair value.
9) Federal regulators: Who thought it was just peachy if investment banks leveraged themselves 30:1 and GSE's more so.
10) Commercial banks: Who skirted capital requirements by borrowing off balance sheet through Structured Investment Vehicles.
11) The Federal Reserve: Whose free money policy inflated the housing bubble in the first place.