I think we need the inverse of Hanlon's razor[0] to be a thing. "Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by systemic incentives promoting malice." A Hanlon's handgun, if you like.
What I remember from reading about the 2008 financial crisis isn't that bankers were incompetent. It's that various parties started packaging up financial instruments to make them look like less risky instruments, so that they could be sold to suckers. Then they insured themselves against those instruments blowing up. This suggests they knew well what they were doing.
In fact, banks aren't in the business of assessing risk. They're in the business of making money, which they often do through assessing risk. The important point is that assessing risk (or giving loans, or mortgages, etc.) isn't their raison d'etre, but a way to make money they've specialized in. If there's a way to make easy money by doing something else entirely, or by compromising their core competence, there are strong economic incentives to do that.
This applies to all other companies doing anything else as well. There's few organizations that consider doing things they do well as a terminal value; usually, it's only instrumental in getting money. That's something IMO we have to keep in mind if we're trying to make accurate predictions of future behavior of a company.
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