Sadly this is the culmination of the "ME FIRST " attitude that has prevailed for the last three decades .
Remember the phrase " Greed is good " which was adopted as the banking industry's mantra.
I feel utterly ,utterly disgusted at the grasping, self centred and greedy attitude employed by these " pillers of society " who are singley responsible for bringing untold misery upon millions of decent people.
Also remember the phrase"there is no such thing as society"?.....Margeret Thatcher gave us that little beauty in the 80,s,and it could explain a lot of what we see in the U.K. today. 
Sorry, guys but this "greed is good" mantra just doesn't wash with me. It's oversimplifying a very complex situation. Naturally, all banks and financial organisations were keen to improve income. It's much the same principle followed by those who buy up properties, give them a makeover and sell them on. I don't regard that as evil. In the same way, I don't regard corner shopkeepers buying goods at the cash and carry and selling them on at a mark up as evil. It's the way it goes.
In the case of the banks, history will show that they were foolish and gullible. The age of computerisation has hoodwinked us all into thinking that a silicon chip can foretell the future. It can't. There is an excellent article linked below which shows that an algorithm (the Gaussian copula function), seemed to predict risk from large mortgage portfolios to an amazing degree of accuracy. It was used by banks, traders and regulators. The only problem was that it was based on only 10 years of data, during which house prices monotonically increased. The program could not handle price falls and defaults because it didn't "know" such a situation could exist. That the financial world could get suckered in by this technology is the worrying thing. It could be that the blame for the credit crunch will one day be laid firmly at the door of this algorithm.
There is a moral to this story, but it will probably get ignored. After all, how many technos do we know that swear by the latest bit of software?
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=1