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the vast majority of the people I've met were good, decent, thoughtful people just like anyone else. All any of them were trying to do was to make a good living to take care of their kids, and have enough left cover at the end to retire in comfort. The didn't want handouts.. .they worked harder than any industry I know doing work that few people know how to do. They are real humans to me

Look, I went to school with a lot of these guys and I know all of that stuff.

Three things. First - that good living doing this stuff is 100 - 10,000 times what their well educated and sometimes far better educated peers in other endeavours make. Two - They are down a couple of Trillion and counting and we have enormous debts to pay off. Three: an incredible amount of this debt was accumulated paying current account sort of stuff (paying for cars and houses produced today with credit to be repaid tomorrow) and not to expand the productive capacity of the US. It is paper pushing rather than real investing.

Finally, there is the problem that a lot of us saw this day coming and have been screaming our heads off about it for two decades. We didn't have our hands of the levers of cash flow. Who is to be held accountable those that did and those that benefited, or the rest of us.

The rest of us have to pay willy-nilly.

But if those are the things you take exception to then you have a problem with our regulatory environment not the banking system or the quants who built the models or the bankers who conceived the collateralization process. You also sound like you have a nice thick socialist streak because you have such a big issue with some people making more than others.

If those are your real exceptions then the people you have a problem with are all those individual people who went out and bought cars and lived on their credit cards. It's a free country. Those people were free to live any way they liked. The banker didn't force them to borrow and live foolishly.

If that's your big issue than you have a much bigger problem than the one we're talking about here. And in a free country, (or even one that's mostly free... or even partly free) your problem is not going to be solved ever, nor should it be. Freedom means the freedom to behave foolishly.

And if you want to claim that their foolishness has somehow affected your life, then you're mistaking cause and effect. The truth is, you're casting around for a demon and you're going to find one whether it's justified or not. If it isn't justified by the actual events you'll distort them or change their scale to include everything from the weather to the gold standard. You're going to "hold someone accountable" whether they were accountable or not. It's just too difficult for someone like you to face an issue without a clear villain.

OK ... fair enough. I made my point and I think you made yours but carry on if you feel the need. I'm prepared to let others decide based on the facts I've brought to the discussion.