I agree with you in that I value savings more than debt (hate the current savings rates) and that the Fed does nothing to help the poor (but that's not their job or incentive to do so and I never thought of it that way ever). The Fed had to do what it did because the banks would have failed otherwise. And if the literally too big-to-fail (and prosecute and everything else) banks failed, then the recession would have been far worst than the Great Depression.

However, a lot of people who still held on to their mortgages do depend on the value of homeprices to stay up, (and the value of a college degree while we're at it since student loans recently overtook creditcard debt).

We're getting way off topic here though. I'll just close out with I think the best solutions are to: 1) Bring back the Glass-Steagall Act and don't allow Investment banks to gamble with consumer money 2) Once (1) is actually in place, then the next time a banking crisis comes around, let all the Investment banks fail and only prop up the ones that actually provide deposits, loans and savings. That will right a terrible wrong done 5 years ago. 3) I came up with this recently after reading Liar's Poker and a followup interview a few years ago of Micheal Lewis and John Merriwether: make all banks private (non-public) corporations again. The only bank that is not fully public is Goldman Sachs (yes, they went public in the 90s, but there are still partners who essentially control it) and is probably part of the reason they do better than everyone else.