The blame has been pinned, squarely and often, on inadequate oversight of U.S. financial institutions, which created ever more complex and risky mortgage instruments, lured people to buy homes they could not afford, and brought the economy crashing to the ground.
Motion on the Earth does not take place in a vacuum. When one thing moves, it moves through or across another. When a wheel turns on an axle, the two surfaces rub against one another. This is called dry friction. Grease can be used to separate the solid metal parts, but this just reduces the problem to layers within the grease sliding past one another.
When there is relative motion between two surfaces, there is a resistance to the motion. This force is called friction. Friction is the reason why people could not accept Newton's first law of Motion, that an object tends to keep its state of motion. Friction acts opposite to the direction of the original force. The frictional force is equal to the frictional coefficient times the normal force.