You're right about the vacuum, but I think you should consider this: the government raided the treasury (or rather, borrowed with the treasury's backing, which can be the same thing if you really insist on looking at it that way) in order to keep unemployment from skyrocketing. As bad as it was, there was serious risk of a domino effect, where the failure of one industry resulted in job losses that reduced overall national income, putting strains on other industries.
As bad as the recession was, the goal was to keep it from becoming far, far worse. "Creative destruction" would have resulted in years to decades of destruction before it ever got around to any creativity, with vast misery in the process.
The bankers may well have taken advantage of that for their personal benefit; I'll leave it to others to make the argument that they got screwed over. There was plenty of screwage to go around: the economy was crashing because the musical chairs of highly leveraged money came to a screeching halt, and everybody scrambled to insist that their paper gains were more real than other people's paper gains. Everybody felt screwed over and there was no way out of this that didn't leave the vast majority of people feeling like they got the shorter end of it.
Everybody will always be able to insist that the economy would have been just fine if we'd just done it their way. It wasn't great, and I'll never be able to prove the counterfactual of how much worse it could have been. But I think it merits consideration: jobs and industries don't bounce back instantaneously, even when there's need, because of inherent friction in the economy, and I think the government acted correctly (at least in the broad strokes) to prop up the existing economy. That gave us time to hopefully put it on a sounder footing. Whether we will or not...