But if you really want a starting point, a single origin, a prime mover for this mess, it is philosophical and ideological. It is the idea that money, (wealth, capital, whatever) is a commodity that can be created through abstract manipulation and clever maneuvering.

Money is what we pay to get what we want, and what others pay us in return for providing them what they want. It is created by human labor, either the labor of our hands, or our mental effort. We keep track of it with little bits of paper or metal, but it is not currency it is distilled human labor that is the source of all wealth. Everything else, credit, interest, profit, stocks and bonds, all the abstractions associated with finance are just accounting tricks. They are markers and chips and ledger entries, they are not wealth and they certainly represent no human effort.

Now these accounting tricks are useful to run a complex economy like ours, they help keep track of wealth and act as flywheels to temporarily store energy or as mechanisms to help distribute it over space (or even time, as in credit) but they are not the reason we have an economy, which is to distribute human labor and its result fairly and equitably, and yes, primarily to favor those who are the most productive.

But these things have no value in themselves. And when you start basing economic activity on these intangibles, when finance and banking and securities become an end in themselves, a substitute for workers and factories and mines and farms, then disaster cannnot be far off. History has shown us this to be the case, time after time after time. Economic collapses, panics, bubbles, depressions, do not occur because raw materials vanish, or workers disappear, or factories close. They happen when the system jams up because the things that happen in finance no longer have any referent in the real world of matter, and energy.

We refuse to learn it because these phony activities can be so lucrative in the short run that they attract the professional money people like honey attracts flies. But the wealth generated this way is not real wealth, any more than printing your own currency is. It is counterfeit, and we are learning that lesson again today, the hard way.