How about The Grapes of Wrath?

Tom Joad: I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin' fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin'. And I been wonderin' if all our folks got together and yelled...

Ma Joad: Oh, Tommy, they'd drag you out and cut you down just like they done to Casy.

Tom Joad: They'd drag me anyways. Sooner or later they'd get me for one thing if not for another. Until then...

Ma Joad: Tommy, you're not aimin' to kill nobody.

Tom Joad: No, Ma, not that. That ain't it. It's just, well as long as I'm an outlaw anyways... maybe I can do somethin'... maybe I can just find out somethin', just scrounge around and maybe find out what it is that's wrong and see if they ain't somethin' that can be done about it. I ain't thought it out all clear, Ma. I can't. I don't know enough.

Ma Joad: How am I gonna know about ya, Tommy? Why they could kill ya and I'd never know. They could hurt ya. How am I gonna know?

Tom Joad: Well, maybe it's like Casy says. A fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then...

Ma Joad: Then what, Tom?

Tom Joad: Then it don't matter. I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.

Ma Joad: I don't understand it, Tom.

Tom Joad: Me, neither, Ma, but - just somethin' I been thinkin' about.

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Bingo!
This post kinda goes along with the post about the rich being jerks.

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It was a quality-of-living conspiracy that worked for a while because of financial assets. Bankers were the engineers of false prosperity. Guess who we take the prosperity away from? The same people we gave it to. I suppose you can blame bankers for being well-compensated during this process. But can you blame them for creating the financial instruments? The thought was, "here's how we justify the creation of enough debt to fuel the lifestyle habits of lower-income and higher-risk borrowers." The whole thing blew up, but not because of the derivatives. It blew up because of the flawed assumption that we could keep creating wealth - and not just for ourselves! - by spreading risk.

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We shouldn't blame this on the poors but every borrower who took out a mortgage they couldn't afford (whether rich, middle class or poor) was complicit in the fraud.

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...or when he takes shits for hours at the Tontine Coffee House.

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It was a quality of human beings conspiracy that continues to work because we have placed our national welfare in the hands of organized crime.

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Just to be clear, I emphatically blame Wall Street bankers for creating an updraft of greed that prompted the people on the ground--the community banks and sleazy mortgage brokers--to lend to anyone who had a pulse. And, of course, let's just acknowledge that Lehman, Merrill and others bought their own mortgage origination outfits to capitalize on this supposed fountain of cash.

Furthermore, I submit to you that it was the outrageous bonuses on Wall Street--and the promise of even greater riches--that effectively created the housing bubble.

Now, I ask you, as someone who has clearly studied for, taken, and passed one or more NASD exams, don't you have some professional responsibilities when it comes to buying and selling securities? And if so, what happened there?

You clearly have inside knowledge. Prove me wrong.

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The fact is, the ultimate purpose of these securities was to diffuse the risk for low-income and high-risk borrowers through tons of counterparties. The whole point of a CDO and the attendant ARS, CDS, etc. is to put tons of people at risk on the same underlying loans. Collectively, the thought was, banks and insurers all have enough capital in the event the underyling borrowers stop paying. The other thought was that you'd never see entire debt class collapses. This was, uhm, false, but it was based on the 99.99% scenario of the last several decades.

Did the promise of incentives create the bubble? Doubt it. We've got a billion other asset classes you can originate and sell for which you can be richly paid. The problem is it's much harder to create demand for, for example, options. Demand for mortages is always white hot; banks have to turn people away, and we as a nation approve drastically fewer apps than we receive today! The problem is that banks - and the Federal Government - thought they had found a way to increase the supply of credit without increasing risk.

You can't discount the unbelievable appetite for debt amongst your fellow Americans. This system, in addition to being a suddenly lucrative career for bankers, allowed risky borrowers access to assets they should never have been able to borrow enough to afford. Even worse, the knock-on effect is that it lowered the cost of capital, generally, for all borrowers. Money was drastically cheapened by the securitization process, and the supposed demand created by easy credit was the scaffolding upon which huge industries were built. It's no coincidence that homebuilders, retailers, consumer discretionary etc. are all collapsing - the demand-side these creations provided essentially allowed a huge part of our economy out of a massively risky bet on credit-backed assets.

We're moving to a rational world in credit markets, dreams shattered. But that world will not be a popular one! Keep in mind the so-called era of prudence we're so ready for involves the middle class enjoying a much lower standard of living - the boom, summarily, was based on the idea that your average American's earning power was ascendant. The grand deleverating of the debt based on that hope is going to suck, but not as badly as realizing that the last few years represented the zenith of the middle class's quality of life and political power, not the nadir. We're just getting started on that whole nadir bit.

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FYI: I know what the mortgage-backed debt and all the derivatives that were written on top of them were meant to do. I'm actually more concerned about what they actually did, which was ruin our economy.

But more fundamentally, we seem to disagree on a basic issue. While you believe that it was the average American working Joe's appetite for debt that drove these excesses, I would like to suggest that it was the greed at the top of the food chain that led to the situation we now find ourselves in.

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When one home on a block is foreclosed, it lowers the value of ALL THE OTHERS on the block as well. When this happens to every block in a town, it lowers the value of every home in the town. When it happens to every town in the country, it lowers the value of every home in the country.

And home value is money, just like stock market investments are money or bonds are money or t-bills are money. They are all investments that people are counting on to get them through retirement or whatever. So this matters.

I think what people like you need to stop doing is trying to figure out who to blame for all this and start thinking about how we fix it. Because it is affecting everyone now. Yes, including renters, because all those foreclosures mean banks are losing money, which means they don't have money to lend, which means businesses can't finance their debt, which means people get laid off, which means states pay more unemployment and health costs, which means there's less money for stuff like transit and schools and homeless shelters and roads and bridges. It's all tied together and it all starts with the housing market.

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