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it played out perfectly within the rules
The players pushed to have those rules changed to their benefit, knowing it could put others at unfair disadvantage or put the system at risk. The Glass-Steagal Act was 70 years old when it was repealed, and not a decade later the exact thing it was designed to prevent from reoccurring, occurred.
Eseman-
I think to pin the 2008 credit crisis (rather than crash) on the repeal of the GS act is rather simplistic. Boom and bust has been an inherent future of market and bourse driven capitalism since post mediaeval times. In my view the 2008 crisis was driven by an inability to measure risk by state and corporate investors. Nobody had to buy the A rated mezzanine credit derivative options that were actually junk. They chose to.
Creative destruction etc...
hurricane_run
When you drill into it o ny a tiny percentage of bankers were acting fraudulently. The cause of 2008 wasn't fraud, it played out perfectly within the rules. The rules, or effective lack of them, were the problem.