I'm troubled by your implication that the end justifies the means. That path leads to evil. I also think you're not understanding finance very well. There's no

I'm troubled by your implication that the end justifies the means. That path leads to evil. I also think you're not understanding finance very well. There's no rational reason to insist that financial instruments must be "directly relating to the demand and supply curve of physical items". There are plenty of good reasons for such instruments, facilitating risk management [1] and liquidity in the markets. [1] Of course, in this case, the particular instruments did the opposite of risk management. This is because their risk models were flawed. I agree with you regarding the moral hazard created by gov't meddling, making it so that financial institutions don't need to learn lessons about ensuring their risk models are based in better-understood methods, or are at least very conservative.