Why are people calling the Wall St. economic meltdown just a plain old "shell game"?

We have to trust our leaders and role models, those zany "Wall St. Boys" who run The Fed, AIG, Goldman Sachs and the U.S. Treasury, don't we? Was Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae just stooges for the Mortgage Bankers n.? Did they just collect fees, markup rotten loans and p them on to their stooges at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae? Was it all some kind of elaborate scam like the S&L scam and the Kenneth Lay energy company scam? Just a bigger scam that is hard to understand? Would anybody dare do that?