[rayiner]

Most of them don't think "they did [something] which had negative nation wide (world wide) implications." Most of them perceive the financial collapse as a structural event caused by nobody in particular, that they couldn't have personally averted, that they didn't intend to happen, that they are getting blamed for. A very good analogy would be Google-ers and Facebook-ers getting together and drunkenly joking about driving up the rents in San Francisco and pushing out poor people. Possibly in bad taste, but not quite as bad as you're making it out to be.

[dpcheng2003]

I'm a fan of imperfect analogies to prove a point so I can sympathize. However, your analogy really lets off the bad agents in the financial crisis.

Enough people directly committed acts some would deem fraudulent (sell baskets of bad loans to unsuspecting municipalities, approve bogus mortgage loan docs, etc.) that they can't fall on the crutch of systemic breakdown.

It'd be like if these Googlers and Facebook-ers wrote software that inflated real estate prices, driving out the poor and increasing the value of their equity in their homes, before an inevitable collapse in which some government bailout had to occur to prevent urban blight in San Francisco, thereby creating a safety-net for the rich homeowners.

[dhoulb]

To extend and correct your analogy: it'd be like if Googlers and Facebookers, and 20 other companies had to create and continuously improve software that unintentionally drove up real estate prices, in order to engage in a highly competitive market.

Their actions, writing the software, aren't necessarily malicious or risky. To their mind they're just doing what everyone else is doing and trying to create the best system.

Then they have an awards ceremony to celebrate the best software. Maybe in poor taste, but they're not even really considering the real estate market. Their game is software, and the financiers game is profit.

Like we don't generally think about the lives of people who make our clothes or computers, because our game is fashion or programming.

It's groupthink that caused the financial crisis (and most other problems), not necessarily malice.