This is my take on the U.S. real estate crisis that is now entering its fifth year and will take quite a bit longer to work its way through, impacting our entire generation. If the wolf was cheap credit, irresponsible fiscal and monetary policies and a lack of regulatory control over the entire banking system, then we all became the wolf too -I remember friends and colleagues who were buying and flipping real estate with 120% leverage, accumulating properties in the sun belt and riding the speculation and inflated prices until the 2006 peak.