I find that that misalignment tends to stem not from any failing of the public, but from the institution of finance itself. I have encountered no vein of human endeavor so mired in jargon or completely disconnected from everyday experience such that most of the public stands little if any chance of properly understanding it than finance.
The public has a relatively simple working model of the financial world.
A)Keep money somewhere safe.
B)Lend money only to those you trust.
C)Save for a rainy day, because while things are good now, they won't be forever.
D)debt above your means is undesirable.
E)debt should be paid
F)no one is going to bail you out so manage things carefully
It takes a proper finance person to make the jump to:
A) Debt is fungible
B) when Credit is cheap, use it
C) Better to bust with a limited liability corp or other legal fiction than to not try
D) Money gets printed all the time. Don't worry about where it comes from or where it goes, it'll all come out in the wash (in theory, and in spite of the fact we know sometimes it doesn't)
E)If you do go bust, don't sweat it, bankruptcy is there for you, and if you're big enough, the government will bail you out through the taxpayers via enough lobbyist pressure.
Case and point: when the system has such stark separations between front and "back-office" concerns, and most of the "back-office" is never tackled as part of primary education, I find it a bit cheap to take potshots at the public for not knowing every intimate detail about how the sausage is made. The info may exist in the knowledge graph, but a successful query of the all the bits and pieces that result in something workable forming that stands the test of time is non-trivial.