@warsaw:
Explain how exactly being balanced in terms of ensuring good business ethics is a bad thing?
As I said, the analogy fits the situation perfectly, You cannot expect a business to act to guidelines without some form of punishment to coerce them into form.

You're assuming that an unregulated market would regulate itself, this has been proven time and time again that this is not the case.
The idea you seem to have is that a market without regulations, without pilots would somehow guide it self, it may well do, but the point of regulation is to ensure it moves in the preferred direction and not just slumping.
Blaming this recession on how the markets may or may not be regulated is futile, it's almost as though saying vehicles should never be driven/piloted by humans and should be left up to the vehicles own devices purely because one pilot had a bad experience.

Either you are extremely ignorant or too arrogant to realize this but everything needs some form of regulation, Business especially, I've seen business' being fined huge amounts simply for using simple practices which violate laws such as fly tipping.
Do you honestly think that if there were no regulations to abide by that these business' would actually regulate themselves?

a few examples of regulation:

Building standard code
Electrical installation safety code
Environmental waste code

Reasons for market regulation:

Ensure business' don't simply buy each other out resulting in no competition and one mega monopoly

Collective action/ public good

Professional conduct

Market reliability

When I say that regulation should be used to some extent, I don't mean bail outs, there is no business too big to fail, if it fails then something smaller will grow to take it's place, the business was complacent of the situation and failed to adapt appropriately and thus deserves failure, how ever bail outs are not the only form of regulating markets, you can for instance, tax imports, give subsidies for new business' which encourages more trading in areas where there previously was none to be had.
The list goes on, I would explain a little further but unfortunately I won't be around to see your response as I'm going to be pre-occupied else where for some time after today.