<i>&gt;  very few experts saw it coming.</i><p>Meh. Plenty of people saw it coming <i>eventually</i>; but most of them had a stake in ignoring it, certain that they could profit handsomely from the subsequent conditions (which they did: bankers received a massive amount of money at rock-bottom prices from state actors, which they wouldn&#x27;t have got otherwise, and most CxO bonuses were still paid throughout).<p>The failure was not an academic one, but rather a political one: nobody wanted to reign in financial speculators. We don&#x27;t need new theoretical models (or rather, we don&#x27;t need them more than we usually do), we &quot;just&quot; need better politics.