Risky debt is like a hot potato - nobody wants to hold it. But innovation in the financial sector made it possible to keep the hot potato up in the air for longer, bouncing it back and forth at an ever increasing rate, with it seldom touching those who passed it back and forth for very long.
Never coming down to Earth, and constantly being fed with cast off and unwanted debt, the potato grew bigger and bigger, and hotter and hotter. Eventually, we had created a potato hot enough and big enough to burn us all. This grand hot potato juggling act started in earnest at the instigation of Ronald Reagan, with his magical, fairyland economic policies - often referred to as Reaganomics.
Well, the decades long Ponzi scheme is crumbling all around us. The hot potato has come home to roost, so to speak. What is lost will never be re-gained. Those who bought in at the peak will never see that money again. We are the ones who got in late, and so we lose. The swindle of one generation upon another is complete.