Facing charges of fraud, lawsuits from investors and an impending divorce, Marcus Schrenker faked his own death in a plane crash in the Alabama wilderness. He attempted to fool FAA officials with fake calls of mayday, claiming that his windshield had “imploded” and bloodied his face. In reality, he parachuted to safety and sped away on a motorcycle he had stashed away in a storage unit. Schrenker was later spotted running into the woods near a hotel in Harpersville before he was captured.

No, this isn’t the plot of a new Bruce Willis movie, and yes, desperate times push people to desperate measures. Anecdotal evidence suggests that our character is tested in times of true hardship and adversity: Soldiers jump on grenades to save their fellow troops. Parents sacrifice luxuries and take on extra work to put their kids through college. Financiers, well, they cut and run into the wilderness of central Alabama.

From my layman’s understanding, the global financial crisis began when borrowers purchased houses using sub-prime loans that they had no hopes of paying back. Then, sub-prime lenders bundled these loans together and sold them to financial institutions that invested heavily in so called “mortgage backed securities.” As the United States housing bubble burst, many borrowers found that their mounting debts outweighed the values of their homes. Debtors defaulted on their loans, and in a domino effect, Wall Street’s greatest brokerage houses fell one by one. Like rats deserting a sinking ship, the CEOs of our country’s most prestigious institutions scampered to Capitol Hill for a “bailout.”

As millions of Americans struggled to secure loans, more and more details emerged that revealed the inner workings of the collapsing banking titans. CEOs of companies like AIG, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley had received hundreds of millions of dollars in executive compensation. More such bonuses were due at the end of 2008 despite the infirmity of their floundering companies. Shortly after receiving a $123 billion dollar bailout (roughly 1/6 of the total Troubled Assets Relief Program budget), credit giant AIG’s executives were caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

“Top earners” — more accurately: those employees who lost the least money — were rewarded with a trip to a luxury spa in California less than a week after AIG received its first $86 billion. Other AIG executives enjoyed a traditional partridge hunt from a 17th century manor in the English countryside. As they slurped expensive wines and dined on halibut, one AIG executive said to an undercover reporter, “The recession will go on until about 2011 — but the shooting was great today and we are relaxing fine.” But alas, this greed and irresponsibility only sounds criminal.

The Washington Post stated that shareholders lost an aggregate $6.9 trillion in 2008 in the worst year for the market since the Great Depression. Many analysts have put this loss in more concrete terms: we have lost all of the wealth we have accumulated over the past decade. Wow, that does sound pretty awful.

In tough times, it would be nice to imagine the heroes and heroines amongst us emerging to save us from whatever plague and catastrophe ails us. But this time around, it seems that the domino effects of bankruptcy and unscrupulous business practices have exposed the avarice and corruption of our society’s biggest crooks.

As the markets tumbled, investors sought to withdraw their capital from investment banks and hedge funds that were posting double digit losses. The problem for world-renowned investor Bernard Madoff was that he had not actually invested his clients’ money; rather, he had built his reputation on fabricated returns while he ran the world’s largest Ponzi Scheme.

Madoff’s $50 billion fraud was the coup de grâce of the financial meltdown. Madoff swindled wealthy investors, European banks and charities alike — and as long as he produced higher than average returns when other funds were losing money, Madoff’s clients asked few questions and had even fewer complaints.

No holds barred free markets allow chaos and corruption to run amok. The S.E.C. investigated — and cleared — Bernard Madoff eight times before his own sons turned him in for fraud. Our economy is too complex for an “If its not broke, don’t fix it” ideology. A little bit of regulation will go a long way towards fixing our broken financial system. Let us hope that in sharp contrast to the last administration, Barack Obama’s administration faces the problems of today with an eye towards prevention instead of recovery.