The First Big Lie: No way you could see it coming

Raghuram Rajan was chief economist at the IMF. In 2005 he wrote a paper comparing the economy to a badly knitted pullover: once it started unravelling, there was nothing to stop it. Dead right, except he chose to deliver it at a festival in honour of Alan Greenspan. Might as well have tried delivering ham sandwiches to a Bar Mitzvah. Within a year he was looking for a new job. Fred Harrison, a British economist, had predicted the depression as early as 1997, and by 2005 was predicting the timing with great accuracy. On the inside, Chuck Prince of Citigroup infamously said in July 2007, referring to the firm's leveraged lending practices: "When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing.' There were too many people walking away with too much money for anyone with power to even think of looking for the brake pedal, but when politicians, bankers, journalists and economists claim that no-one saw it coming, it is explicitly untrue. By what elasticity of justice can they be held unaccountable for their complicity? Oh, I see. They're now sitting in judgement on their own case. You couldn't see it coming. Course not.