Oftentimes we find ourselves frustrated by a seemingly corrupt world around us. In our society, we can easily identify aspects of dishonesty, theft, fraud, etc. These exist at all levels of society. Smaller acts of dishonesty are the most obvious — i.e., someone stealing a car. And it’s easy to find solutions: identify the thief, return the car to its rightful owner and inconvenience the thief for breaking the generally agreed upon moral barriers. Crimes in the streets are the easiest to recognize and also the easiest to correct. Harder yet is when large institutions participate in fraud. The individual may feel powerless to do anything. With the street crime, one can call the police and the problem is usually resolved. But there’s no number to dial when large institutions breach honesty.

For example, take the subprime mortgage crisis, which helped kick off the recession of the late 2000s. Low quality, high risk, mortgage-backed securities were being bundled together into what are called collateralized debt obligations and then sold to investors bearing the highest quality, low risk labels: AAA ratings. When the markets shifted and investors tried to cash in on the collateralized debt obligations they had purchased, they opened them up and found junk inside. While, at the same time, some insiders knew the collateralized debt obligations were rubbish, so they hedged against them and made millions.

We can get upset with financial establishments, but ultimately the blame lies on ourselves. In the spirit of competition, capitalistic institutions will do whatever they can get away with to make a dollar. At the time, we couldn’t be bothered enough to actually look into the systems that allow our economy to function. We didn’t ask for more oversight. Or perhaps we did but didn’t push hard or long enough to establish it. We wanted a safe system to invest it but didn’t feel it important enough to put in the legwork. We got what we deserved by being passive and submissive. The only thing left to do is to learn from our mistakes and move forward, pushing harder this time for the changes we deem necessary.