A lot of people, it seems, are blaming Wall Street and the banks when they are the ones that signed mortgages they could not afford to buy homes that were grossly overvalued at the same time they had massive credit card debt, two cars (both with car loans), student loans, and furniture bills.
Everyone in the media is blaming the recession on the fact banks were willing to make bad loans. Yes, they were. And most of the stockholders of those institutions (re: the owners) have been wiped out, or effectively wiped out so the term “bail out” isn’t appropriate except for the idiots in the executive suite that caused the problems. Yet, it seems they are overlooking one basic, simple fact: No one made homeowners borrow money to buy an asset that was overvalued and that they could not afford.
There are drug dealers more than willing to supply both you and me with everything from cocaine to heroin. Yes, the drug dealer has responsibility, but my value system blames the user because you chose, in virtually all cases, to become addicted (there are a few notable exceptions).
Perhaps it’s a different view of the world, but I think of it this way: Our life is the cumulative sum total of the decisions we have made up until this point in time and the reaction we have had to past events. We may not be able to control what happens to us, but we can control our reaction to those events. Responsibility for my life begins and ends with me.
Maybe it’s family that instilled this. When my parents dropped me off at college, the last thing my father said before he got in the car was, “You are now responsible for making your own dreams come true.” The message was clear: Although he and my mom loved and supported me, I was only going to get out of life what I went out and got for myself. They couldn’t do it for me. It was probably the single most important thing he ever said to me. (Years later, I found out that they drove away and then came back, parked on the street outside of the dorm so they could look up at the window as I moved in, and sat in the car crying.)
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I'm a private investor who loves architecture, furniture, clothes, history, philosophy, books, cooking, and music as much as I do finance. 
