Once that incentive was removed, mortgage servicing (often contracted to the same banks) could continue, putting unrelenting pressure on people who had taken out the loans. So what if they lost their loaned properties? Well anyone who had put down a down payment or had equity in their home lost that down and equity. So this ended up being a very one sided transfer of wealth out of the hands of people taking out mortgages, while preserving the profits of banks (they didn't have to accept the losses of the securities bought by the Fed...).
To me it looks like the the organizations with the deepest buffers of wealth (banks), got a bailout by the fed, while individual people bore the full pressure of having their wealth systematically reduced.
As an alternative, the fed could have risked similar or less money by offering to pay down some slice of the principal of the loans, requiring a refinance/reset to put the security back into balance with the market prices. This would have allowed wealth to stay in the hands of individuals, somewhat insulating the banks, but resulting in less transfer of wealth.
https://www.sec.gov/news/press/2008/2008-211.htm
Those banks should have been insolvent, and wiped out investors, it cost Americans an estimated 12.8 trillion dollars by kicking the can down the road
https://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/2008-financial-...
The working class wasn't robbed at all. Maybe they lost the value they thought their homes had, but the reality is that all of that was just inflated.
2008 was an issue of moral hazard and unfortunately Joe Schmuck isn't aware of that going into a mortgage agreement. This will continue to happen forever until people finally learn that when something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
If you want to blame 2008 on anyone, you need to spread the blame like peanut butter among lending banks (but not every bank!!!), people who took on mortgages they couldn't pay (if nobody defaulted, the crisis would never have happened) and above all the credit rating agencies who exist for the sole purpose of assessing risk and maliciously failed to do so in order to not piss off their biggest customers (the banks).