There are many ways to create economic suicide on a national level. The major way through history has been through indebting the economy. Debt always expands to reach a point where it cannot be paid by a large swathe of the economy. This is the point where austerity is imposed and ownership of wealth polarizes between the One Percent and the 99 Percent.

In fact, there's no way that banks can be paid everything that they're owed.

Most of these charges that people pay are economically unnecessary. There's no real cost behind them. There's no real value behind them. So, they're what the classical economist called empty pricing. Prices with no real cost value. What they called rent and fictitious capital. Capital claims on junk mortgage borrowers. The pretense is that all these debts can be paid but it's all fictitious, because everybody knows - at least on Wall Street everybody knows - that many debts can't be paid.

If a lot of money goes into the stock market, it'll push up prices, making money for stock speculators. Then the insiders can decide that it's time to sell out, and the market will plunge.

When you say "bank," a bank is a building, a set of computers and chairs and things. The bankers are the people running these banks. They're the chief officers, and they push the loans because they don't care if they go bad. For one thing, they may package these bad loans and sell them off to gullible institutional investors.

Nobody prefers to earn income any more, because that's taxable. Rich people prefer to make capital gains.

Stocks always go down much faster than they go up. That's why it's called a crash. People who put their money into the stocks will find, all of a sudden, that stock prices are no longer being supported by the debt leveraging that's been holding them up.