One of the beauties of the modern age is that documents that once would have been either inaccessible, or taken years of sleuthing to locate, are now readily downloadable from the Web. One such set of documents is the transcripts of the meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) in 2007, all of which have now been released.
Everyone who wants to understand why we’re now mired in a permanent economic slump should read these documents—not because it will explain the slump itself, but because it confirms that those who were supposed to ensure that such calamities didn’t occur were clueless about the approaching crisis. Jim Cramer famously ranted precisely the same message at the time, and copped a lot of flak about it, but he was dead right—and the transcripts prove it.
