The emergence of the largest financial crisis in post-war history can be attributed to a series of micro and macroeconomic factors, such as the formation of bubbles in the US real estate market, the use of financial innovations in conjunction with increasing international deregulation, rising private and public debt, short-term oriented compensation systems in the financial industry, and many more. Upon closer examination, these points turn out to be merely symptoms of even deeper-rooted causes of the crisis. The problem behind the problems reveals the existence of entire pyramids of partially interdependent dilemma structures of varying hierarchies. The theoretical core is based on the model of the prisoner's dilemma known from game theory. When markets find themselves in situations of prisoner's dilemmas, they correct.