Jon Robb offers a highway robbery style of Wall Street manner of business:

Actually, Wall Street in combination with the Fed and the US government, systematically looted the incomes of Americans for three decades despite scintillating productivity improvements.

I can recall Nicholas Gruen saying that income tends to rise with productivity improvements and is the best indicator of rising income.

However we have seen the rise of the information worker in the same period which has split the workforce into two; the highly paid and educated mover of information and the service economy of low paid work which supports the working and lifestyle of the information worker; keeping offices clean, restaurants served, hotels managed, etc.

This is more consistent with Richard Florida's reading of the creative class which suggests the productivity gains have been heterogenous, rather than homogenous across professions. Robb continues:

Next, dissatisfied with that pile of money, they went after the remaining wealth of Americans, their homes, via low cost and often toxic mortgages and thereby destabilized the bedrock of the global economy.

I did not use the ARM mortgages as I did not trust them. They sounded shady to me. However the construction and home buying boom meant that I moved from a condo to a house faster than normal. Our condo had fourteen people look at it over a weekend and then we were offered above market for it.

I got embarrassed about that and bundled in home insurance in return for the offer. Probably an indication or sense that we knew things weren't right.

The flip-side was that the house we bought was over-priced and expensive, and within two years, if I had not bought when I did, I could not afford to live in the neighbourhood I was in. Robb writes:

Finally, and likely worst of all, when they crashed the entire system they found the means to get at the final and sole remaining pile of relatively untapped cash left: the US government. Through a system of private gains and socialized losses, they are in the process of devouring this last remaining source of wealth.

Which is the US Government and borrowing against the ability of the US taxpayer to repay anything the US Government borrows - and this whole TARP has been done on the tick again, borrowed, borrowed and borrowed.

One of the guys I play paintball with commented one time that sometimes he wishes the whole world would collapse and the fools be weened out. As he said, he knows he can look after his family. I fell similar in that respect, I can compete in the labor market and in the free market entrepreneurially. I have no other choice.

Those working the financial markets should have to face the same as I do. The banks should have been allowed to fail. They are crap now after being bailed out, and were crap before, I fail to see the distinction, or the value of throwing US taxpayer money in there. My productivity is paying for that too, as is my ability to be productive in the future. In my not so humble opinion, it is morally wrong.