Why? Are you saying it's easy to make money if you're just providing financial services? :/

No, I'm saying the industry as a whole failed.

The whole industry didn't fall. It was about a dozen extremely large insitutions, and the extremely small institutions that depended on that group.

There were institutions in the middle who weren't involved in the mess. See BB&T, as an example, they were actually forced by the government to accept a bailout, as to make it seem like the whole industry failed.

Agreed. The whole industry bailout was a huge punishment to BB&T, which otherwise probably would have profited tremendously from taking over much of the business of the failed banks.

By the way, as I understand it, there's a difference between "the whole industry" and "the industry as a whole"

I don't think that's true at all.

Several banks did fantastically, announced record profits etc. The industry as a whole didn't fail, some particular institutions did.

The way the bailout was sold to us was that if these failing institutions were allowed to collapse, they would have brought down the rest with them. I actually hold that to be true and for me that equates to an overall failure of the industry.

I know it's how it was sold, but I disagree with it. We should have let the bad companies fail and the good ones succeed.