>You are the only person here accusing shareholders in mass mess and similar things. Take it away and situation will normalize greatly without any moves on Joe's behalf.
>In regard to 401k plans, it is up to a person to handle or not to handle it and/or how to handle it, and so on. Your extreme points will require assumption that this Joe is a plain moron who cannot be trusted to do anything and therefore everything must be handled by someone/something more capable. I wonder by whom.

All in due irony, until ironed out. All the bad moves, that is, the moves which now somehow seem to fall into both "sounded like a good idea at the time" and "everybody else was doing it so we had to do the same to stay competitive" were justified by the sacred duty of the CEOs, CFOs and other generalissimi to increase the profits of Joe Q Shareholder. So I presume he told them to do so.

Or they presumed he would have told them so... and behaved as if Joe Q was indeed a total moron and they knew better. So they kept emiting loans after loans. What was the base? One percent of real money, last I heard. Just like a really good juggler does: he never handles twelve balls. He handles zero or one at a time; the others are in the air.

So this distributed system, where everybody (among the 60% of people who own bits of the cake) owns a bit here and a bit there, but almost never enough to have a say in anything (because he was told to diversify to minimize the risk), is - I think we agree there - not much of a fault of Joe Q Shareholder. He may have made a choice here and there without knowing too much. He pays enough to his broker to know these things for him, right? So then it's the brokers, banks, comoditizers and securitizers of suboptimal stuff who have pumped this bubble (loan/housing) just hoping they will be able to sell the losses to someone else when it bursts, making money like crazy meanwhile.

Not that I'm complaining - I got my mortgage when it was cheapest, paid it off in 33 months and the value of our house has doubled meanwhile - even with inflation. The mess doesn't touch me much. I just don't see this normalizing soon, no matter where we lock Joe Q.