Since you apparently haven't lived in America during the dowturn the fact that they had a lot of loans on the books enabled them to sell certain financial instruments with those loans and made them look good to stockholders because of the removal of Glass-Steagall. Banks love to do this whenever possible. Companies like it because of spiraling stock market gains. Glass's genius was in getting investment banks out of the lending game.
It'd be really nice if I blamed companies for everything bad. You know I don't. You don't like to think though.