Cue Howard Beale:
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy.

It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.'

Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad!

I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad.

You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!'
- Network (1976)
The "shadow financial system" being a big key, as tequila notes, seems curiously missing from the current national discourse. This area also being home to massive cases of fraud and naked short selling.

Quote Originally Posted by tequila View Post
Schmedlap, your targets are rather broad and miss out on two key ones: the massive expansion of capital available for investment in the past 20 years, and the extraordinary degree of overleveraging made possible by the growth of the "shadow financial system" that grew up to service that capital outside of the regulatory infrastructure that governs banks and thrifts. SIVs, hedge funds, private equity groups, etc. that became so profitable that the inevitably became enmeshed in and took over large parts of Wall St itself. That massive overleveraging is what has turned a standard housing bubble into financial apocalypse.
My sister works for Lehman, she's been kept on for the next couple weeks, I guess to sift ashes.