99% of the blame should go to the banks and credit agency. The book The Big Short explains this well. Yes, the public participated in bad loans. But there was a natural limit to this, there's only so many people and homes. If it stopped there, the crisis would have been much more limited.

But what did banks do once they hit the limit? Invent CDO and then synthetic CDO to create "artificial" supply for the bad loans. These derivatives are what really made the crisis very bad.