It shouldn't be too hard to put a face to the victims: take a look around you. This kind of disparate fraud impacts all of the non-beneficiaries. That includes me, you, your aunt and uncle, etc. etc.

Also worth noting that, broadly speaking, the same general class of folks harmed by this practice were also helped by other "bank errors" in their favor. (By that, I mean the wealthy. People who can afford to be shareholders in banks.) So it's doubly hard to feel bad, since, by and large, the wealthy have never been doing better.

The most likely answer though is not a lack of creativity - because its very hard to imagine the harm caused by these, relatively, arcane legal instruments.

There is a harpers article linked in the story, it should be illustrative of the clear harm being done to normal people, and how corporations made a calamitous end run around legal procedure - the same issue which is happening today (the "two-fer" paragraph).

If you need faces, realize that people were foreclosed on when they should not have been, those deeds were NEVER legally owned by the banks because the banks and their intermediaries didn't follow up on the paper work.

Yet those people got evicted, and banks claimed ownership.

An economy is largely predicated on working systems of assessment and legal redressal, more so for First World economies.

And this happens because, as you said, its hard to imagine the harm being caused.

That's not what happened here, though; the homeowner managed to avoid foreclosure despite not servicing the mortgage, precisely because the banks messed up the paperwork.

There are victims in the overall saga: people who were missold mortgages that they were never going to be able to service, at rates higher than they were entitled to, who lost their savings as a result. But they don't feature in this story.

But that story has been written, as have pages upon pages of what happened.

Reading through it all and being well informed will likely be the realm of a few people, the best we can hope for is to be directed to other resources.

Your second paragraph: you relate "general class of folks harmed by this practice" (ie everyone) with "the wealthy" ...? Can you explain that, I'm a bit confused.

But it is my contention that the top 1% are doing quite well. You do not need to feel bad that a handful of their bets paid off poorly, any more than you should feel bad upon hearing that the eventual winner of a poker tournament lost a hand at the first table.

But if you start chipping away at this trust, it’s 10x harder to earn it back, and in my opinion, once it reaches a tipping point, enough people figure out its every man for himself and gaming the system snowballs irreversibly.

Then you have a system like many poor countries, where you have no idea when you could be dragged into court and bled dry because someone disputes your claims and you don’t have the political (bribes/connections) clout to defend yourself.

The taxpayers did not lose money in the bailouts . . . they didn't get acceptable risk-adjusted returns, but they didn't lose money.

You don't need to be wealthy to have a financial interest in the financial sector. You need only to have a retirement plan.