To be sure, the just-released transcripts of the Federal Reserve meetings from 2006 do not look so terrific with the benefit of hindsight. But don't just point and laugh; you should read a bit of the transcripts yourselves. What you'll see is a very sophisticated group of people assimilating enormous amounts of information. The math and deduction that would predict the events of 2007 and 2008... well, who among us was banging that drum in mid-2006? (Okay, a few people!) But even those of us with anecdotal data—I, for instance, knew something was wrong with America when a friend who was an unemployed non-citizen immediately got a rather enormous interest-only mortgage on a vacation house!—weren't exactly raving like Cassandra. And the Fed transcripts aren't all ridiculous. Susan Schmidt Bies, who retired from the Fed in March of 2007, and then went on the Bank of America board, made a presentation on CDOs, mortgages and mortgage servicers at the Fed meeting on December 12, 2006. READ MORE

That pill-popping, boy-crazy nincompoop Ayn Rand has got a lot to answer for. Indeed, it's not too much of a stretch to say that we owe at least part of the recent economic crisis to her and her philosophy of Objectivism, since former Fed chief Alan Greenspan was a lifelong disciple of both. READ MORE