The 2008 crash was not a freak accident but a system built to shift wealth from ordinary people to Wall Street, and the same conditions are being rebuilt today — bad news for homebuyers and savers, good news for the big banks.

• Cheap money from the Fed flooded into housing, and lenders like Ameriquest pushed adjustable-rate mortgages onto people who could only afford them if home prices rose forever.
• Wall Street bundled those bad loans into securities, paid rating agencies to stamp them safe, and AIG insured them many times over.
• When prices stopped rising, millions of families lost homes and jobs, while bailed-out banks paid record bonuses and borrowed from the Fed nearly free to buy government bonds at a profit.
• Only one banker went to prison, compared with hundreds after the smaller 1980s savings-and-loan scandal.
• After the crash, Fed money-printing pushed up stocks and home prices, and Wall Street firms bought up foreclosed homes cheap, pricing out the very people who lost them.

Outlook: With borrowing higher than ever and the same incentives intact, another debt-driven crisis is expected, with ordinary people again likely to pay the bill.