Why didn't the federal government give bailout money to home owners instead of the banks?
Because they didn't want the overall economy to collapse, and take down the banking system, and foreign currency exchange systems with it, when they could do it the way they did it, and save the overall system, but let some people off who morally and ethically should not have gotten off. I STILL think they took the least-bad approach.
The problem itself could have been prevented, back during the Clinton Administration, but by the time they did what they did, it was all about preventing the total collapse of the economy, which would actually have actually have done the most damage to the ones who played by the rules.
In a democracy it is STILL better to let the guilty go free than to punish the innocent, although both are bad choices, sometimes they are the only choices.