“It’s pathetic what a sound financial system can be reduced to in a few decades, with just a little ( </sarcasm> ) vote-buying finagling by the government . . .”
Excerpt of a very good article that takes it back “a few decades”...
“What about the long-awaited bank reform law, which Congress finally delivered in July 2010 in the form of the Dodd-Frank Act? The law does not address the fundamental factors that have caused recurrent, intensifying financial crises: fraud, accounting, executive and professional compensation, and regulatory failure. The law does create a regulatory council that is supposed to identify systemic risks. The council, however, will be dominated by economists of the same theoclassical stripe who not only failed to identify the systemic risks that produced the recent financial crises, but actually praised the criminogenic incentives that caused those crises.”
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2011/0111black.html
...and doesn’t even mention the couple of decades old BIG ELEPHANT in the room...DERIVATIVES...UNregulated, UNaccountable instruments of looters/socialists.