While I appreciate you sentiment, Billy Ray, I'd urge you to consider the incentive structures. In many cases, the bankers doing the deals that ultimately tanked the economy had no real skin in the game. Maybe some outstanding options, or some stock, but for the most part nothing. So, if your compensation dictates your behavior, they would be incentivized to take excessive risks. They don't suffer the full consequences when the whole system falls apart, because they've already extracted their bonuses. For top execs who do have stock comp, many of them would get golden parachutes if the company suffered, so even they are covered. If we didn't bail them out, we wouldve likely had a meltdown worse than the great depression. I truly believe we had to bail them out, but that afterward we shouldve broken them up, and gotten a massive equity stake in anyone who got bailed out. Otherwise, as you point out, there becomes a serious moral hazard of rewarding their risk taking.