Who's to blame? Who got us into this financial mess? That's a question I've been asked a lot lately.

We won't have the answer for years on how the U-S economy got tangled in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. We will have to wait for historians to unravel the whole story. But for now, everyone wants to find somebody to blame.

If you listen to the presidential candidates these days, Wall Street is to blame. It's corrupt and greedy. In fact, most people on Main Street are blaming their problems on Wall Street. It's a convenient explanation.

Some people blame former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. He's to blame because he kept interest rates too low, for too long. Every time there was a problem, you could count on Greenspan to cut rates.

Talk to Europeans and they say it's the whole United States that got us into this mess.

But you know what, we're all to blame.

Let's step back for a minute and analyze this.

The toxic debt that's poisoning the financial system is made up of home mortgages and home equity loans that have gone bad. And those mortgages and loans were taken out by ordinary Americans.

Who made the decision to take on that mortgage he couldn't really afford? Who used the proceeds of a home equity loan to go on a fancy vacation? And who made all those loans? And wasn't it the banks who then sold those mortgages to Wall Street so they could free up their balance sheets to make more mortgage loans and riskier ones?

When Wall Street got those mortgages, it sliced and diced them into newfangled securities, until no one could identify what they contained or what they were worth. Then those securities were sold to hedge funds, investment banks and investors around the globe.

If you sold your house over the past 5 years, you got a higher price, thanks to the funny business going on on Wall Street. You didn't complain about that.

If you bought a house, you got a fantastic low interest rate, thanks to the availability of so much credit. No one protested about that.

And if you bought shares of banks and Wall Street firms like Lehman Brothers, you made a pretty good profit because of the boom in financials in the stock market. So that felt good, right?

And then there was the government. It stoked the mania.

Congress and other policymakers pushed for policies creating more low income homeowners. Remember the zero down payment initiative? Well, it worked. And as the numbers shot up, Democrats and Republicans all cheered the rise in American home ownership. Isn't that what George Bush championed: the ownership society -- a world in which every American family owned a house.

What I'm saying is that this global financial web came about because Main Street, Wall Street, overseas investors, the government, and you and me all participated in the scheme. We benefited -- until now.

Certainly some people benefited more than others. They got bigger profits -- much bigger profits.

But, we are all to blame. The whole country has been complicit.

But out of all this bad stuff, there could be some good. I think this scary financial crisis has been a big wake up call for all of us. The era of "shop-till-you-drop" is coming to an end. Gone are the days of using our homes as banks and spending money we don't have. I think we are entering a new era of saving and thriftiness. I've been cutting back and thinking twice before reaching for my credit card. Aren't you? It's back to basics. It's back to discipline. We will see people spend less and more wisely. And I think that's a good thing.