It wasn't intended as such. Finance is a very important part of the economy and should be.

I actually blame regulators for creating a false sense of security. A more "wild west" environment would have at least led investors/counterparties to question more of the claims that were being made leading up to the crisis.

The root cause was and is the ability for people to gamble with other people’s money and only share in the upside. It promotes ever increasing levels of risk taking. Plenty of mid level people knew they were selling or buying crap but there was zero incentive for them to stop.

I see your point. I view that as a problem with the incentives firms gave their employees.

However, think about the role of government incentives. It took decades of tax breaks and other stimuli to get the public to think that real estate prices "just go up" year after year. It was this massive blind spot about real-estate that was (I think) at the core of the failure of firms to appropriately manage systemic risk.

"Work[ing] on Wall Street" is a metonym for all of finance, and the sentence in question (especially when paired with the previous sentence) implies that such exploits are the predominant endeavor in the industry.

I do think there are many legitimate aspects of finance.

However if you consider the impact that mispriced real-estate had on credit markets, and consider that bad regulation led to over-investment in real-estate, then the massive chunk of the market that went away when the bubble burst was all profiting off of regulatory mistakes.

I consider things like the mortgage interest deduction a massive regulatory mistake, as well as the capital gains tax exemption, etc.