For the most part I'd not see the GFC as a morality tale but rather a kind of weird emergent phenomena whereby one area of the economy became so big and complex that it was beyond's anyone's ability to manage, and the interactions of the millions of bit players in it - all of whom in their own way wanted to succeed and do well for themselves - led to this collectively disastrous outcome.
Which isn't to say that nothing illegal occurred - I'm not sure how you'd draw a boundary around the GFC but there were a number of securities fraud prosecutions in the years afterwards - but I think if you take the GFC and subtract all illegal behaviour, you'd still have the GFC.
It's pure unadulterated fraud. No one was punished.
I also think your explanation of the GFC overlooks what was an extremely multi-factorial situation. Most explanations would allocate some causality to changes in regulation, changes in global debt dynamics. Securitization aside, it was the peak of a huge borrowing/lending boom not unlike numerous previous financial market crashes.
No that is now true, people wanted to regulate derivatives but Alan Greenspan and others who were in power decided not to.
Was it Bush's status quo? That's not an insinuation or loaded question, I'm just wondering if Bush just perpetuated what came before (from Clinton, or Reagan, or Bush Sr.), and Obama continued in that tradition.
I assume there was more teeth to enforcement of this at some point in the past (I hope), but don't really know enough to know when that would have been.