Senator Clinton today squarely blamed Wall Street for the subprime mortgage collapse and urged money managers to come up with a voluntary code to help those threatened by foreclosures on their homes or face legislation strictly regulating the borrowing trade.

Speaking to an audience of donors at the Nasdaq stock market headquarters in Time Square, Mrs. Clinton said that while borrowers were also responsible for taking out loans they might not be able to afford, the subprime mortgage turmoil was mostly due to the indifference of Wall Street lenders to the consequences of mortgages “that were designed to fail.”

She proposed a 90-day moratorium on home foreclosures, a five-year freeze on subprime mortgages, providing borrowers with time for the home market to recover and to arrange new financing for their loans, and obliging mortgage lenders to provide regular reports on how many mortgages had been moved from adjustable to fixed rate loans.

“Wall Street needs to be part of a comprehensive solution that brings to the table all those responsible and calls on them to do their part. Wall Street helped create the foreclosure crisis, and Wall Street needs to help solve it,” Mrs. Clinton said.

She said that there was no time to wait for the election of the next president. In the two months that it has taken Treasury Secretary Paulson to adopt her idea that states should raise money through bonds to help distressed families threatened with home foreclosure, 225,000 mortgage defaulters had been ejected from their homes.

Mrs. Clinton warned that if the mortgage lenders did not emerge from the subprime crisis summit called by Mr. Paulson with a way of helping homeowners in distress along the lines she suggested, she would consider introducing legislation to force their hand. The new laws would include offering legal protection to mortgage advisers who work with borrowers to help modify their loans.

The leading candidate for the Democratic nomination also demanded that there be $7 billion in immediate cash assistance to ameliorate the worst of what she called “the foreclosure crisis.” Too many middle class Americans are facing a “trap door” where the payment of a single bill would tip them into penury, cause them to fail to make a mortgage payment, and thereby provoke the foreclosure on their homes, she said.

“The concentration of foreclosures in particular neighborhoods has a negative ripple effect on communities, leading to higher rates of crime, lower tax revenues, and lower property values,” she said. She therefore demanded $5 billion in federal funds to help prevent foreclosures by providing financial counseling to those families at risk.

In addition, Mrs. Clinton called for $2 billion in immediate assistance to help poor families pay for heating in cold weather states.