Something Worth Saying Over And Over

The Atlantic has an article explaining, in so many words, how America behaved exactly like all those emerging nations it has a tendency to look down on and got themselves in to exactly the same sort of mess that leads countries to ask the IMF to bale them out. Full of good stuff. Especially this little bit:

A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true. [...]

Of course, this was mostly an illusion. Regulators, legislators, and academics almost all assumed that the managers of these banks knew what they were doing. In retrospect, they didn’t.

Of course these bankers who didn't know what they were doing are now trying to convince people that they are the only ones who know the system well enough to dig us out of this mess. Hmmmm.