Poor morals did cause the recession when you consider the first domino: credit/housing. Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and the like forced banks to make "diversity loans" to people who couldn't pay them back with the Community Reinvestment Act. They were getting something for their efforts, so they did this out of greed. Franklin Raines, Jaime Gorelick, the son of Roger Mudd (forget his name) and others at Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bought this worthless paper with the help of taxpayer money to cook the books. The greater the number of these worthless loans on the books, the greater the amount of their incentive bonuses (in the 10s of millions). Greed is a bitch.