Jake, I'm expecting you will have heard the saying "don't cut off your nose to spite your face?" There may have been satisfaction in cutting off the banks, but society would have been hideously disfigured too.

If you want to pursue principle, you need to decide whether it's an act of faith or an intellectual decision. IMHO business has to be an intellectual decision, meaning you must constantly review the principles to ensure they still apply. In this case I don't think they do. A small number of institutions and individuals benefited from behaviors that caused a one-way extraction of trillions of dollars from society. No sane society would regard that as a success. So now we need to be sure it won't ever happen again- and to try to recoup as much as possible for the benefit of the poor old taxpayer. The apparent desire from some bankers to "get back to normal asap" is not a promising sign. Those people need to be corralled and managed for at least a generation in the hope that future practitioners won't be exposed to greedy destructive behaviors and may be able to be trusted again at some point.