The something that clearly needed to be done was to make the perpetrators pay for the damages of their crimes, not the victims. If the US financial system collapsed, there would be a deflationary shock and the short term high unemployment associated with an economic realignment, but the country would be much healthier financially in the long term. Instead the crisis is simply being dragged out, with the inevitable day of reckoning certain to be much worse because of it.

The amount of money the US has pumped into its corrupt financial system is enough to put its entire population on welfare for years. A sane approach would have been to let the banks fail, let the markets tank, and ease the transition as needed with bottom-up debt relief and aid.