The hearings in Congress drone on, the latest being last week, trying to discover what went wrong and caused the panic of 2008, with all its repercussions.  Nothing has come of these hearings, of course, and the general public continues to be fed the line by our leaders that it was a giant failure of capitalism and a lack of regulation.  From what I hear (anecdotally) from many, many people, is that this is the opinion shared by most of the public.  Plus, you hear that it was also the faults of greedy bankers, bad mortgages, stupid car companies, and the list goes on from there.  I don't blame people for thinking any of this; after a disaster like we just had, it is just plain human to want to know how it happened and who to blame.

The thing is, we have it all wrong.  It was not a failure of capitalism.  It was caused by the intrusion of government into what is now only a shadow of a purely capitalistic economy.  If the government hadn't meddled with Federal Reserve policy, regulations on mortgage lending to encourage home ownership, and lots of other incentives to lend to folks who couldn't pay back, the latest crisis would not have happened.  But, not wanting to face the music and look into the mirror, Congress will surely now pass a lot more regulation to fix a problem they caused and in many ways is still in place.  Idiots.

Then, not wanting to shine a light on the mirage of safe banks now propped up with billions of paper make believe money still being shoveled into their coffers, no one has pressed the issue as whether all those horrible derivatives (still on banks' books but no longer having to be accounted for their real value) as the Congress changed the rules to make the whole charade look better, are worth anything!  They aren't and so we continue to kick the can down the road.

Whenever I talk about this stuff to people they invariably ask when the big disaster is coming. Will it be in our lifetime?  Will it be soon?  The answer is: Who knows?  I suspect it will be sooner than later and that we won't see it coming.  The straw that breaks the camel's back will not be clear until after the crash has hit.  And I am positive that in hindsight at that time it will all seem like it was so simple that how could we have missed it?  Easy; we humans are great at fooling ourselves no matter how high and mighty and educated we think we are.  Self-delusion is a survival tool that all of us have.  So much misery could be avoided it only we would allow ourselves to see what is right in front of us.  Ah well, as Winston Churchill said, change comes when people hear the gong of their own self preservation.  Until we hear it, no change will come, so all of us need to be ahead of the curve and not just sit and wait for it to happen.