NP: John Cage, 4'33"

Nate thinks maybe Wall Street only deserves part of the blame, and this bit sounds like what I've been saying for a while now:

The mortgage companies themselves, of course, also exercised exceptionally poor judgment -- as did the media, with its Flip-This-House fetishism, which perpetuated the fiction that one of the biggest asset price bubbles in American history was in fact business as usual. Whether to assign any blame to the homebuyer himself is probably not important. It's tempting to say: if Joe the Homeowner had only read Schiller, none of this would have happened! But it's difficult to expect the consumer to behave rationally when they were getting such bad information from their televisions and their elected (and appointed) officials.

I usually point to Extreme Makeover: Home Edition as the cultural zeitgeist, but I like the sound of "Flip-This-House Fetishism" a lot.