I am impressed with the hundreds of brilliant people who are willing to give florid and luminous insights into the reasons for the current financial disaster.

I am impressed with their ignorance of economic history.
It wasn't until 1963 that Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz published their carefully researched
master piece on the history of money that anyone knew that the wild swings in boom, bust, national depressions and inflation from 1850 to 1890 was due entirely to the volatile supply of gold and silver discoveries in that period. Tens of millions of lives tossed on the waves of the economy by forces they could never have fathomed.
Even today, 80 years after the beginning of the Great Depression we are still vigorously arguing about the sources, causes and policies that played a central role. Just recently UCLA economist Lee Ohanian published
original research showing that wages at the beginning of the the Great Depression were too high for the labor market and that Roosevelt pro-union policies aggravated the situation.
Eat humble pie, eat humble black-crow pie with the feathers, all you experts on the current financial status.
P.S. Anna Schwartz is still alive. If you want to see what she thinks about the current financial crisis check here. She and I agree. Nothing has worked in the financial world so far. Getting rid of mark to market is the best thing for financial organizations....it just happened.