Many interpret the string of bank, and now corporation, collapses as if the power elite were suffering, forgetting that banks and corporations are not the same as their shareholders, and their interests are not the same.
If you understand the nature of the ‘corporation’, that it is regarded legally as a ‘person’, meaning that its shareholders and directors are not ordinarily legally liable for losses, then you can see that what affects the banks and the corporations does not necessarily affect their shareholders in the same way. Indeed, it is very likely that a great deal of this crisis is shareholders ditching these entities for various reasons, not the least of which is to sell them short, i.e. to sell while the price is high with the intention of buying back when the price is much cheaper.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will pay very real prices for that, but that is to the extent that we have bought into the same system.
The downside for the hundreds of thousands of people who will lose their jobs and houses, can have, not only the possibility of victory, as Hajj Umar Ibrahim Vadillo showed so eloquently in his talk at the 11th International Fiqh Conference in Cape Town 2008, but also the possibility of a return to sanity for those who do not regard themselves as needy dependants on the banking/industrial system, because the usury driven model of society predicated on growth and development is literally insane. And sanity is a precondition of Islam and of victory.