Financial Meltdown of 2008: A Crisis or a Correction?

In an article in The Progressive, Ruth Coniff blames consumerism for the financial meltdown:

That might be good for those of us who care to withdraw voluntarily
from the rat race at the mall. Buy Nothing Day also happens to be the
Friday after Thanksgiving–a day of nonshopping organized to spread the
word that, as Adbusters –http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/bnd–puts
it, "There’s only one way to avoid the collapse of this human
experiment of ours on Planet Earth: we have to consume less."

But it is also a sign of the dire shape of our economy. Here is the conundrum of the financial meltdown: we are all living in a world fueled by unsustainable spending.

But this implies that the consumer created the bubble. And that if consumers went a little crazy again, as they did today in a stampede at a certain Wal-Mart, the economy could get "back on track."

Simple question: Is that true?

Wasn't the ability of the consumer to overspend fueled in large part by an unsustainable growth in real estate value, that convinced him he could safely use the house as an ATM? And wasn't that growth in turn fueled by the so-called securitization of mortgage-backed bonds, essentially, which in turn were based on the underlying belief that housing prices could not fall? 

The consumer is the pawn in this game, it seems to me, and the players were the math wizards who thought they knew it all. A better essay in Adbusters by ecological economist Herman Daly called The Crisis memorably explains the true difference between a real economy and a paper economy: 

After winning the Nobel Prize for chemistry, Frederick Soddy decided he
could do greater good for humanity by turning his talents to economics,
a field he felt lacked a connection to biophysical reality. In his 1926
book Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt: The Solution of the Economic Paradox,
(a book that presaged the market crash of 1929), Soddy pointed out the
fundamental difference between real wealth – buildings, machinery, oil,
pigs – and virtual wealth, in the form of money and debt.

Soddy wrote that real wealth was subject to the inescapable entropy
law of thermodynamics and would rot, rust, or wear out with age, while
money and debt – as accounting devices invented by humans – were
subject only to the laws of mathematics…

The problem that we’re seeing in the US has
arisen because the amount of real wealth is not a sufficient lien to
guarantee the staggering outstanding debt which has exploded as a
result of banks’ ability to create money, loans given out on shaky
assets and the US government’s deficit,
which has been stoked by financing the war and recent tax cuts. All of
these factors are exacerbated by the compounding mechanism on debt.

Further complicating the picture, Robert Schiller discusses how the financial meltdown of 2008 is primarily a "behaviorial economics" problem. He thinks we as a society were much too confident about our economy over the last eight years — along the lines of his earlier book Irrational Exuberance — and now we're paying the price. Call it a crisis, as he does at one point, or call it a correction, as he does at another point. Either way, like the Great Depression, he thinks that it may last for years.

Hmmm. Time to start growing vegetables?