House builders (Participants, victims)

Role: building and selling houses

Fault: prompting consumers to buy real estate that they couldn’t afford, at inflated values, thus created the housing bubble.

Result: Recession in the real estate market after bubble burst

Representative：Beazer Homes USA

Person：CEO Ian McCarthy

House buyers（Participants, victims）

Role: house buying

Fault：allowing themselves to be misled into excessive consumption; some speculated through house buying with sub-loans.

Representative：Malicious defaulter

End: lost the ownership of their mortgaged homes and suffered economic loss caused by the financial crisis.

Mortgage brokers (Participants，propellants）

Role: agency between house buyer and mortgage lender

Fault：prompting people to buy houses to make intermediary costs; no responsibility when the bubble bursts; this field is easy to enter and the potential profit is huge; efficient management is absent.

End：squeezed by the shrink of real estate market and credit market, but not punished seriously.

Mortgage lenders and banks（Participants, victims）

Role: making loans to house buyers, “bundling” the loans and selling them to other financial institutions.

Fault: making sub-loans without exercising due care, and abusing financial leverage to finance through commercial banks.

Representative：Countrywide Financial

End: purchased by the Bank of America on the eve of the second round of the subprime lending crisis.

Person: Former CEO Angelo Mozilo（turned Countrywide Financial to the biggest mortgage lender in America through drastic expansion of subprime lending, now criticized for changing “American dream” into “American nightmare.”）

Representative: New Century Financial

End: filed for bankruptcy protection during the first round of subprime lending crisis People: founder and former CEO Brad Morrice, present CEO Holly Etlin（former Chief Restructuring Officer of Brad Morrice）

Representative: ACC Capital Holdings

End: Its businesses in wholesale mortgage and mortgage service were purchased by Citigroup in 2007; its retail mortgage service gradually ceased.

Person: Roland Arnall, owner of ACC Capital Holdings（the disseminator of high-risk credit, died of cancer in March 2008）