An Economist’s Mea Culpa

According to Princeton economist Uwe E. Reinhardt, writing in the NY Times:

1. Our entire 21st-century banking sector, managed as it is by graduates of the nation’s top business schools, supported by highly trained financial engineers, and monitored around the clock by thousands of allegedly bright financial analysts, immolated itself with highly toxic assets, purchased with borrowed money, and in the process infected the entire world economy.

2. The economics profession slept comfortably as Wall Street was imploding. Fewer than a dozen prominent economists saw this economic train wreck coming — and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, an economist famous for his academic research on the Great Depression, was notably not among them.