Wall Street was the driver in buying up these shitty mortgages to put into MBS/CDOs -- and quite a few big banks bought mortage originators so they could get bigger margin on these deals. Unfortunately for them Wall Street couldn't find buyers for all of this toxic crap and/or were too dumb to realize how bad some of this stuff was (ie Citigroup). That's why you had a bank run on Bear Stearns, once people realized the collateral they were using in the repo market was effectively worthless.