Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina on Ryan this morning:

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51. Trillions of dollars disappeared literally overnight.

It wasn't tucked away; it just didn't exist.

If you loan someone $200,000 and there is no realistic expectation that they can pay it back (let alone the interest on it) and people start spending the interest on that loan; at some point, you have to stop and realize that the real money is never gonna show.

They were spending money that never really existed. They had those bad loans insured, but the insurers were spending the premiums as though the loans would never fail.

I'm not defending bankers, but they didn't necessarily benefit every time someone lost a dollar. Had it been up to me; we would have bailed out homeowners, and with the influx of house payments some of the banks would have weathered the storm, but the banks were sitting there with a lot of toxic assets, not piles of cash. (until Bush and then the FED gave/loaned it to them).

There were a lot of unsecured loans, meaning there was never really anything of value behind the loans, let alone dollars for them to tuck away.