Well, on the plus side the bail-out v.1.0 has failed. Something will likely pass soon, but for right now we're safe. While there is some definite legislation that helped drive this and is the root cause, the problem needs to be corrected via the private market - not the Feds.

Of course, that legislation isn't going away, but I'm guessing that the bundling of loans into portfolios full of good and bad is.

Yeah, but the basic problem has been a part of the world forever. It's just the Gold Rush of '49 all over again: Someone figures out a way to get rich quick, and then ten million arseholes are following him in trying to get theirs too, and all of a sudden the market's collapsed and everyone's standing around with a "who farted?" expression.

Well, yes - but that's one of the things inherent in capitalism. Companies will fail. Other companies will then figure out why they failed and (hopefully) do better than the prior one's did. It's not always forward progress - there's a lot of fail built in to the system from the get go.

This doesn't mean that some level of regulation isn't needed. History has shown that it can help, but the level of regulation needs to be as small as possible and any change needs to be put together after serious thought, debate, and investigation. Knee jerk = bad.