The documentary film "Inside Job" was shown in class last week. It highlights huge investment banks and how they were the cause of the financial crisis. It's blatantly shown from a liberal perspective (Mr. Bigsby teaches us, "Don't let the liberal media tell you how to think and feel."), but a lot of the points were valid. However, I think the real problem is not the "greed" of the financial industry or the lack of regulation, but the inability of individuals to admit a problem.
Throughout the film, people from different government agencies, banks, and other organizations are interviewed. According to the interviews, there seemed to be two different types of people: some people were on the outside blaming people on the inside, and those on the inside didn't know who was at fault (but it definitely wasn't those on the inside...).
Everyone on the outside was quick to point out the problems in the system, and in a lot of cases they were right. Everyone on the inside didn't see those things as problems even though they were visibly uncomfortable talking about those things. When an adviser is being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by a nation to write a positive paper on the economy of that nation, of course there is a conflict of interest; none of the insiders admitted that this was an issue.
The problem isn't capitalism, severance packages, and bonuses paid to executives; the problem is that nobody was man enough to admit when mistakes were made and then take steps to fix them.