We're currently experiencing the awful after-effects of living lives of excess.  During the late 90's and early to mid 2000's, we bought luxury cars, expensive jewelry, outrageous toys we never needed in the first place and homes that were too pricey for our pocketbooks. 

What on earth made us feel like we could live so lavishly?

Celebrity culture should definitely take some of the blame.

That 186-inch TV in your living room is a powerful influencer.  What we see on the tube and at the theater feels so real while we're watching it that our minds begin to imagine that our own lives could and SHOULD mirror the experiences that are being had on camera. So immediately after the credits roll at the conclusion of a program about livin' large, we began to scheme about how we, too, could live the lavish life we just vicariously enjoyed so much from the comfort of our cashmere wrapped LoveSac that was purchased with last week's grocery money.

With the late 90's and early 2000's being defined as a time when you were publicly defined by what you owned, instead of who you were as a person, the programming in the media inspired us to go out and spend, spend, spend.  Everyday it was "dolla, dolla bills y'all!" - even when you didn't have any to begin with - until the shops shut down in the evening.  We threw cash at whatever made us smile, even though we knew the credit card was reaching its max.  And we did this partly because we wanted to live like the celebrities who were featured on shows like MTV's Cribs.

What our financial meltdown has proved, in relation to the media's previous years of exaggerating how easy it was to make yourself appear like you're wealthy, is that people needed to get out of the house more often to experience what real-life was like: an environment of mostly blue collar individuals who don't have any business owning a fridge full of Cristal champagne that they drink in the company of their pet tiger.  But, instead, we watched the glitz and glamour that was being portrayed on TV and grew to be so delusional that we thought that we, too, could have a Hummer, that's rolling on dubs and is parked in the driveway of our own personal Neverland.

So yeah... look at us now... we're a world that's in financial ruins.  Yes, there were factors other than celebrity lifestyles that played a part in making our money drip out of our hands so easily, but it sure as hell can't be ruled out as being a prominent suspect in the case of "Who done it?"