Public shaming is, indeed, deserved.
If you sold or supervised persons selling subprime mortgages made to fail, you are shameful. You are a liar, a fraud and a cheat and you should be in prison.
If you made short sales on bonds backed by subprime mortgages made to fail or supervised persons making these sales, you are shameful. You are a liar, a fraud and a cheat and you should be in prison.
If you made money from the sale of toxic derivatives ("bundles" of percentages of bad debts - like %.005 of this debt plus %.025 of this debt, etc which no one can unravel or figure out) to a pension fund or supervised persons making these sales you are shameful. Actually, if you made money from the sale of toxic derivatives, you are shameful. You are a liar, a fraud and a cheat and you should be in prison.
If you sold "derivatives" or "collateralized debt obligations" or any of those other complicated euphemisms for fraud, you are shameful. You are a liar, a fraud and a cheat and you should be in prison.
If you sold those fraudulent mortgage investments and then bet against your own investors, you are shameful. You are a liar, a fraud and a cheat and you should be in prison.
If you rated subprime mortgages and derivatives "AAA" - as employees of Moody's, Standard and Poor's and other debt-rating agencies did - you are shameful. You are a liar, a fraud and a cheat and you should be in prison.
If you were anywhere in the food chain of these fraudulent mortgages and investments, you made money on the misery of others. You made money on other people losing their homes. You made money on thousands of retired, elderly people losing their life savings and facing the rest of their lives with nothing to live on. You made money on families with children being made homeless. You made money on millions of people losing their homes, their jobs and everything they had. You made money on driving other people to suicide. You made money on reducing families with children to sleeping on the sidewalk.
You are shameful. The very least you can expect as a result of your actions is more regulation. If we're lucky, that will be enough. If we're not, you'll destroy our country. Please stop yourselves and don't require the rest of the American people to step in and stop you.
Everything everyone on that food chain of fraudulent transaction got as a result of those fraudulent transactions - pay, bonuses, capital gains, stock options, property, etc - should be taken away from them and used to pay back those fraudulent transactions.
If you'd like to know more about specifically who caused all this heartache, see this excellent article which names the 25 top companies responsible for the 2008 collapse and the Wall Street firms behind them. You can even go online and look up the names of specific executives of these firms to find out who was responsible:
http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/economic_meltdown/the_subprime_25/
