[dahfizz]

Yes, but that scenario has a few issues in my mind:

1) the people running the fed are not particularly rich. If there is some grand economic engineering scheme, these people would be 100x more wealthy.

2) if these things are predictable, where are the predictions? Besides one lucky guy who nobody knew of beforehand, nobody publicly predicted the 2008 crisis. Why aren't these qualified individuals stepping forward? The Big Short guy has gotten tons of fame and money from his prediction. If people could reliably predict these things, they would do so much more often.

3) I don't see any obvious way that a financial crisis benefits the fed or politicians or whatever shadow governments you're alluding to.

4) if such sophisticated economic engineering was possible, surely the benefactors would go about it in a much more subtle way.

I think you get the point. Believing your version takes a lot more leaps of faith than accepting that an incredibly complicated and sometimes irrational system is hard to predict.