A Comment Deleted and then put back by the "Man" at a New York Federal Reserve Blog Post

Experience shows that what happens

is ...the thing against which one has not made provision

in advance.

John Maynard Keynes

"The excuse that most other professional forecasters
didn’t foresee
it is just that, an excuse.

Some professional forecasters did see it.

Should economic plans

designed to fix large, complex predicaments,

rely on many who created and profited from the initial problems,

who may not have wanted to identify and confront them

when they were small, relatively unknown and lucrative?

They were derided as Cassandras
and dismissed by ...insiders,
who are only beholden to each other,
and to their own delusions.

Did some economic and political leaders

bail themselves and their compatriots out of their own mistakes,

by pledging trillions of debt and newly created money,

knowing the consequences would be handed down

to many who may be unaware

including the unborn of following generations?

Millions of amateur economic forecasters
...saw what was happening and what was coming.

They had one important advantage.

They live in the real world, not inside the Beltway,
not within the marble halls
and equally hardened thought processes of the Fed,
and not in the ivory towers of academia,
a word which sounds like a disease, because it is a disease.

If there are at least 15,000 professional American Economists,

and less than 1% foresaw the financial crisis,

should many financial industry

and government paid prognosticators

be relied on for honesty concerning national finances?

Not only do these environments cause delusional thinking,
they attract delusional people.

The Failure to Forecast the Great Recession

Simon Potter
Federal Reserve Bank of New York

The same is true of policy makers.

I call it elitist personality disorder.

It leads to delusions of grandeur,
delusions of omniscience and omnipotence,
and the unwillingness to take responsibility for failure
and incompetence, instead engaging in blame shifting."

Lee Adler

It is difficult to get a man to understand something

when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Upton Sinclair