Good for them. Markets are working. If the emotional and social value of forgiving debt is worth more than the expected value of collecting on that debt, then capitalism is working! Who could be opposed to this?
The market doesn't price such things in, though. That would be up to the government. How much was spent on the bailouts, and how much would that translate to per mortgage?
Not to mention politically motives to encourage debt, by incentivising things like mortgages, or creating educational debt systems, etc.
The very dollar itself is an instrument of debt, and it is self-perpetuating -- there has to be a way to pay off the interest on that debt that was the genesis block for that dollar, of course that's done by "printing" money (adding a zero on a digital ledger), which creates inflation, which encourages people into debt, which requires more money to be printed, which requires interest to be paid off on that dollar, which...
Ultimately we as humans coin many words for real experiences. In my experiences, I exchange my services, in exchange for a representation of value, and in turn purchase my necessities with this representation of value (and in this modern era purchase wants as well).
Personally if you want to stick with idealism, I would coin Capitalism as "... an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and capital goods, and the production of goods and services for profit in a market economy."
We don't have that 100%. That's for sure. The government has a large part of of modern means of production. And the true public also has co-operatives, syndicates, mafias, gangs, and non-profits.
We definitely have a market economy though. So I definitely agree with your point. I just think Capitalism is nothing more than an ideal.
Because I enjoy this topic so much, my system classifications are as follows: The West: "Inverted Totalitarianism", EU: "Pre Natal Neo-Feudalism", China: "Party Monarchism". As far as I'm concerned, ideologies are great for discussions, but horrible at describing real things.
It means the wage-labor model of business.
[0]there are different styles of this, on the conservative end there are those who tend to value the individual accrual of assets; on the liberal end you might find nationalistic types who measure the greatness of society by how much in assets it accrues or trades (indirectly, by measuring GDP).