You almost had me there, Andrew Sorkin. Financial crises, the boom and bust cycle, hey-ho; that’s life, right? Strikes and gutters. We can never prevent the next one because each one is different, and just like the army, regulators end up always prepared to fight the last war.
I was buying it.
Then you tried to cap things off with a neatly topical quote, and I woke up:
In his memoir, Henry M. Paulson Jr., the former Treasury secretary, recalled telling President George W. Bush in 2006 that it was impossible to spot a coming financial blowup.
“We can’t predict when the next crisis will come,” Mr. Paulson told the president. “But we need to be prepared.”
Whoa. Whoooooooah, there, hold on just one second. Uhm, sir? I remember 2006. I remember that the irrational underpinnings of the mortgage market bubble were quite apparent to an awful lot of people, even if those people happened to mostly work outside of the Dept. of the Treasury. I remember “Flip This House” and “Flip That House,” and I remember people laughing at the term “NINJA loan,” invented for the large number of mortgage recipients with “no income no job (and no) assets.”
Gosh, that one was so funny.
Plenty of thinking people were quite well aware, however, that clever acronyms or no, America’s financial sector was dancing atop a rumbling volcano. The fact that nothing was done to move us to safety was not the result of forecasting economic perils being inherently impossible. It was the result of spineless, useless, worthless, brainless and gutless tools being in positions of “leadership,” with an assist from a journalistic “watchdog” too hopped up on goofballs to offer up even one good “bark.”
Unfortunately, though, Mr. Sorkin’s larger message that the next economic crisis will be along sooner or later is very likely to be proven true, even if his suggestion that the last one was unforeseeable is baloney. Those who do not learn from history…