Law360, New York ( October 27, 2011, 2:29 PM EDT) -- There is certainly plenty of blame to spread around for the financial meltdown that started in the residential mortgage sector. In the aftermath of the debacle of 2007 - 2008, homeowners are blamed for foolishly believing that real estate values could only go up; mortgage originators are blamed for capitalizing on that foolishness by relaxing underwriting standards and creating mortgage loans that were affordable only for a short time, and then off-loading all the risk they had created; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are blamed for insuring against defaults they knew or should have known were inevitable; the banks are being blamed for leveraging the bad loans and making truckloads of money in the process; the monoline insurers are blamed for facilitating the process by creating credit default swaps that were supposed to insure the risks that no one really understood; and the regulators are blamed for not regulating the entire system closely enough....