These are the people ...

Who are supposed to know what's going on. In fact, they're less qualified to run the economy than I am. Set the Wayback Machine to 2006, when the bottom was about to fall out of the housing market. We look in on the Fed meeting of that time:

...

But the officials, meeting every six weeks to discuss the health of the nation’s economy, gave little credence to the possibility that the faltering housing market would weigh on the broader economy, according to transcripts that the Fed released Thursday. Instead they continued to tell one another throughout 2006 that the greatest danger was inflation — the possibility that the economy would grow too fast.

“We think the fundamentals of the expansion going forward still look good,” Timothy F. Geithner, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, told his colleagues when they gathered in Washington in December 2006.

...

You know Geithner, the President's economic 'wizard'.

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The transcripts of the 2006 meetings, released after a standard five-year delay, clearly show some of the nation’s pre-eminent economic minds did not fully understand the basic mechanics of the economy that they were charged with shepherding. The problem was not a lack of information; it was a lack of comprehension, born in part of their deep confidence in economic forecasting models that turned out to be broken.

...

Of course, when you realize these are all Wall St. alumni, the incompetence makes perfect sense. Many of us were running around with their hair on fire, knowing that housing prices couldn't be sustained at those levels and the people who were buying those houses couldn't afford them. It always amazed the shit out of me that a family of four with an annual income of $45K could be put in a house and given a mortgage that I, who made considerably more at the time, wouldn't have touched with a 10 foot pole. It was a recipe for disaster that many saw coming. Unfortunately, not the folks who were in a position to stop it.

Thanks to Mr. Philadelphia for the link.