[graeme]

Lots of people gave warnings. I was reading warnings about it in the Economist for years.

It was a damned complex system and so is the economy. A lot of stuff is only fully obvious in hindsight.

You also have the problem of knowing who to listen to. Many people are warning about many things right now. Some are prescient, some are wrong. How to judge?

2008 could have been better predicted and better prevented, but it's false to say no one warned.

[acdha]

It’s also worth remembering just how much money was at stake: everyone who stayed in was going to make a lot more until the crash so there was an enormous incentive to tell yourself that you could time it tightly. If the people making those calls get their bonuses now with little perceived long-term personal risk, that dynamic gets even more toxic.