Does it not occur to anyone that there might be something inherently and fundamentally wrong with our whole financial and economic system?

Of course it does. But there is an assumption that there is absolutely nothing, at a fundamental level, that can be done about it. The economy is seen as a "natural phenomenon", like the weather. All we can do is improve and refine our infrastructure so as to better weather its storms.

The economy, however, is not a "natural phenomenon", but a man-made one, the product of collective human behaviour.

What it boils down to is not just greed, but the human "prime ape's" natural drive for "power" and "things" in its continuing, fatefully misplaced, Darwinian struggle for survival and advantage in the socio-economic environment, which has effectively replaced the natural environment, for which millions of years of evolution formed and adapted this behaviour.

Our economy, free-market capitalism, is deeply rooted in and dependent on our dumb-animal nature and behaviour, which it developed - naturally enough, in view of human origins - specifically both to serve and exploit. This is why is seems ,in many respects, to work so well.

We have been seduced by the phenomenal amount of material wealth, thanks also to the exponential development of science and technology, it has produced, and thus blinded to its inherent injustice, inhumanity and non-sustainability.

What also blinds us to reality is that we are ALL completely immersed in and dependent on the status quo.

Blinded? Us? Homo sapiens (wise and rational man)? The most intelligent creature in the known universe? Made in God's own image? (for theists). The world's greatest brains, educated at Europe's and America's finest universities?

SURELY NOT!!!!