The Sub-Prime Meltdown

The sub-prime mortgage crises in the United States has left a trail of destruction in its path. No company from a financial giant like Citi Group to a retail giant like Wal-Mart is immune to its repercussions. But people whose homes are in the process of foreclosure or whose houses have been foreclosed are the worst hit of them all. And with some analysts predicting some two millions more homes going into foreclosure within the next year, we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg.
But who is to blame for this crisis... Is it the home owners who borrowed more then they could afford, the home builders who built homes, the lenders who lent funds to people with poor credit, the wall street (including investment banks, hedge funds, rating agencies etc) which brought the repackaged mortgages and sold them to other willing buyers or the government for not enough oversight of the lending industry.
There is plenty of blame to go around and all of these players contributed to this crisis to a certain degree. But just playing the blame game would not solve this crisis which is threatening to cause a global recession. Necessary actions need to be initiated including working with embattled borrowers to work out plans to save their homes from foreclosures, stricter regulations of the lending industry to see this is not repeated again, regulations of the hedge fund industry, better education of potential home owners on risk management, and better risk management on the part of wall street. No one solution is going to solve this problem. Efforts have to be made from all directions to manage this crisis better before it gets worse.