Major Economy Crisis: Any affects to underground hackers? Who is behind the game?

For many years we have obvsevered several economy downtimes. Out of which this time is supposed to be the most worst in more than 20 years. Looking back in 2000, recession does not reflect much longer period of downtime comparing 2008-2009. However, this industry laid vicious circles which keep changing the shape of economy when bankruptcy and massive losses has been reported across United States, United Kingdom and Europe. As a result, this has affect the major Western zone of the world indeed an Asia too.

Looking forward into media and underground world of hackers, the first question arise: Who is behind all this? or who could be a part of this dramatical changes? Let's justify it in one or the other way. This is a reality indeed a fact that Hackers run the underground economy but what if someone somewhere out to control the real world economy. To clarify more, lets take an example:

"One man sitting behind the stock market place in NYSE (New York Stock Exchange), playing with old terminal type computers pushing and poping the index rates of various companies. Good Person? Yes." But what could be the probability if he opens his email containing virus/worm capable of infecting the major financial mainframes and the overall network one-by-one. Assuming this worm has multi-spreading capabilities (e.g. spam, hoax, bots) it would have given full control to the remote attacker to change the ONE 0.56223 value to another 0.56001. In practical world, this is TRUE and 100% possible. Lets examine the stock market security breaches in between 2006-2009, to name few in public:

At Zdnet.co.uk News, 03 Feb 2006, Virus crashes stock exchange systems
At Zdnetasia.com, October 14, 2008, McAfee sees rise in stock scams, social-engineering attacks
At Sharescity.com Blog, 12 March 2009, Online Stock Trades: Tigger Virus Targetting Online Trading Accounts
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Jan 17, 2007: The TJX Companies Inc
July 3, 2007: Some 8.5 million customer records were stolen by a database analyst employed by Certegy Check Services Inc.
Sept. 15, 2007: Online stockbroker TD AMERITRADE’s computer system was infiltrated by hackers
July 20, 2007: SAIC, a Pentagon contractor, failed to encrypt data on 580,000 military households before transmitting it over the Internet.
...and many more...

As you can see this has pumped into media early by McAfee in late 2008. The only outcome of the above discussion is to alert the financial firms and other business entities holding their fortune on stock market and how this could be going into major risks.

Apart from the above discussion, experts evaluate that "IT Compliance" area is supposed to be more affected from late 2008 due to credit crunch across the world. On the other side, more companies seem to deploy in-house projects on security products and services rather than contracting with third party. Although, there is sharp increase in information security needs which would always be needed and never been removed due the fact of digital world? Well, hackers rule the economy of the world.