The crash happened because of us. We, collectively, are the only force large enough to stop or create such things. We created the crash in the absolutely standard way.

1. First we ate up all the sausage we could get while choosing to completely ignore how the sausage was being made.
2. We spent instead of saved, and so we drove up profits and prices and debt in a spiral that couldn't be sustained.
3. When the cracks started appearing, instead of doing anything reasonable that might have let us land semi-softly, we all pulled back hard and so the bottom dropped out of the whole thing, making us all vastly worse off and requiring the government to step in in a large way to keep it from going seriously south.

Human nature is the worst possible financial planner, but it always drives the large scale changes. I've said it a hundred times, did anyone here, during the late 90s, write their congress person and ask them to do something to slow down economic growth? I doubt it seriously. But it's not like we didn't all know it couldn't be sustained.

And, if we'd all have saved heavily during those years, it would have both slowed the economic spiral and left us all with a nice cushion when it started back down again so that we'd have had a controlled landing instead of a dive bomb, because we all could have kept spending at semi-reasonable levels. And of course all those people wouldn't have bought houses they couldn't afford either.

Not that Washington can't influence things, but it doesn't have nearly the economic leverage as we do collectively as citizens. So what we do is ultimately what matters, in those somewhat rare cases where we all line up in the same direction.