"Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon." - Churchill

It would be silly to suggest that there haven't been abuses. But those simply do not rest SOLELY on the shoulders of bankers.

Regulators, (Home/Propety) Appraisers, and borrowers are surely complicit. In fact, in the run-up in the mortgage debacles there clearly was a symbiotic relationship. Fools were flipping houses to make a quick profit and it was all good until the music stopped.

Have a read of Michael Lewis' wonderful books - 'The Big Short' and 'Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World'.

In the first he bares witness to the fact that almost NO ONE understood the CDO/CDS and a particular Deutsche Bank trader went from full bull to full bear on the whole game, much to the incredulity of his peers, his employers, and two other parties who'd figured out that the emperor had no clothes. In essenece, when everyone was making money, no one could stop or at least didn't believe the music would stop without them having a chair (musical chairs).

If an Art History major, even one from Princeton, can figure this out . . . it's not rocket science. (Granted, some sections of 'The Big Short' are a bit mathematical.)

In the second, he examines, with pithy irony, "beware of Greeks bearing bonds" and how various populations (Greece, Ireland, Germany, etc) behaved when the money was there for the taking.

As for the whole CDO/CDS . . . go back to '98 when an intrepid Brooksley Born raised in investigation into the entire market of CDSs. She was effectively shot down by Alan Greenspan, Larry (Lawrence) Summers, and Arthur Levitt (head of the SEC). At that time the market was in the mid-100 $Billions. By 2008 it had increased to an estimated 56 $Trillion, one year of TOTAL global economic output.

That enormous leverage, and it's lack or regulation, gave forth to ENORMOUS counter-party risk.

So . . . back to "bankers". AIG, an enormously successful company of over 100,000 employees was brought to it's knees by about 1,000 folks in London of whom perhaps 40 were directly responsible.

Too much money chasing too few assets - asset bubble. The "chasers" - borrowers, appraisers, credit rating agencies, regulators . . . and some bankers.

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Orange, it's the new black.