In this issue we commemorate the anniversary of something whose remembrance requires no celebration. It’s been five years since the smartest guys in the room blew up the economy. Those were dark days. I remember being in a conference room in the late autumn of 2007. Our CFO, not a jolly fellow to begin with, was looking out the windows at the Manhattan skyline. “In a couple of months,” he said, “the mortgage market is going to fall off a cliff and take the rest of the economy with it.” I thought, “Come on, Ned. Have another plate of berries and cheer up.” He had the berries. He didn’t cheer up. Now we know he was right.
By 2008 we were in free fall. Everybody’s stock lost most of its value. Each day brought disclosures of how intelligent people can be stupid when their minds become besotted with money and the unfettered power to make it. Thank goodness we’ve learned so much from it all!
Now I find, sitting on the teetery perch we occupy as we look back at the fearful days of 2008, that there are, oddly, things I remember with fondness about that scary time. Grim pleasure, maybe, but pleasure nonetheless.
I loved being proven right in my opinion of bankers. Everything I ever thought about them turned out to be true. Bankers betting against the stuff they were selling people. Bankers dispossessing people of homes purchased with loans they had made to the homeowners. Bankers trying to get over on the system in 100 different ways. When I was a kid, it was always the banker in the movie who was trying to take away the family farm. After 20 years of general banker-worship in the press, here, finally, was the real deal. Thank goodness all those mean, manipulative bankers are gone forever.
I also remember with fondness the momentary confusion and retreat suffered by a whole bunch of bullish (I almost wrote another word) financial pied-piper types who had led their credulous followers into disaster. In particular, there was the sight of Jim Cramer, who had to put down his gongs and cowbells and say he was sorry he had offered so many people so much bad advice. Thank goodness he’s not doing that anymore.
Of course, Cramer was just the tip of the pundit perp walk. The entire field of economics woke up with a pound of egg salad on its face! The rotten underbelly of the profession was laid bare! What a scam! Thousands of Ivy League brainiacs all calculating and opining, and here we were in this mess? Thank goodness we don’t listen to economists anymore.
Then there was Bernard Madoff. Here was a guy who had been honored by the highest officials in our financial firmament. He ran Nasdaq. He was called to Washington to give his views to the SEC. There’s no fun in contemplating what he did, but what it showed us about the regulatory system and its drooling collusion with big money was not only instructive, but kind of delicious. And, you know, it taught us so much. Now we know that Wall Street needs to be overseen by regulations that make such things impossible, don’t we.
Maybe that’s the best thing I remember about that time. As bad as it was, I recall, back then, nursing a spark of hope, and not just hope for a recovery we knew would eventually come. It was more than that. It was a feeling that when we did come back, it would be with a new kind of knowledge that would make the world a better place from here on in, that the pain would teach us all some kind of lesson, the way a child learns not to touch a hot stove after he does it once or twice.
So tell me. Are we going to stay away from that stove or not? I’m thinking not. How about you?
Follow Stanley Bing at stanleybing.com and on Twitter at @thebingblog.
This story is from the September 16, 2013 issue of Fortune.
