Capitalism without the corrective downward functions of capitalism creates scary unwieldy beasts. Moral hazards are very real yet the people who wished to avoid this in 2008-09 by letting them fail were called reckless (myself included) as austerity would have caused a ripple effect which hurts the incomes of regular people.
But instead of giving temporary safety nets to protect those regular people - while weathering the storm of a recession and rebuilding the system into something better, an evolution of sorts - the US gov went head and gave safety nets to the big corps and maintained the status quo of the last generation.
Which allowed the type of behaviour your talking about to flourish.
Basically the government and financial power players kicked the can down the road for the next generation to experience the effects of competitionless financial exploitation. The priority was (and is) valuing the financial industries short-term health over the organic growth of business, the flow of capital to things that create jobs (aka small/medium businesses which employ 90% of people), and long term wealth generation.
I personally don't find it surprisingly that it took 8 years for median incomes to rise again while the top tier upper class has been doing absolutely fine since the crash. This was by design of a liberal democratic administration.
Yet regular people are in no better position to deal with the next recession (particularly economically and to a lesser extent socially as US health care is slightly better but still embarrassingly bad) and the same people who caused the last one have likely been given better jobs, raises, and positions of power from which to influence on the next political administration.