Dang. I wonder if something like that over here would've made the people who took out the expensive mortgages they couldn't afford think twice about it before they did it.
I put the blame on three entities:
1) The Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan for keeping rates so low for so long in the early part of this decade, thus giving an incentive for reckless lending practices.
2) Investors for being greedy and seeing real estate as a loss-free investment. Thus, you had people buying multiple properties to sell them at a profit in a couple of years, at most, driving up home values substantially.
3) Banks for pushing non-investment minded individuals into bad loans so they could collect higher interest and fee income. Additionally, many of these banks also encouraged people to seek out homes for the maximum amount they "qualified for," even if it meant seeking out a house much larger than borrowers had initially imagined. Since the qualification standards were themselves reckless, as set by the individual banks' policies, they were essentially encouraging even upper middle class home buyers into reckless mortgages.
In general, it is harder to put the blame on individuals here, since it was an institutional failure brought on by greed.