They dance lightly around the regrettable fact that every part of the system failed. The US government pushed the private sector into issuing trillions of dollars of bad debt. Both parties in Congress imposed the obligation on lending banks to make 25 per cent of their mortgage business commercially unjustifiable (following an upgrade of banking debt). President Bill Clinton ordered the giant government-sponsored mortgage companies (generally known as Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac) to put more than half of their huge mortgage portfolios into such investments. This was a political free lunch. Thus the Democrats took the credit for increasing family home ownership and boosting the building trade and land development industries at no cost to the taxpayer.

The financial system leapt at the opportunity presented by this massive market operation. The Securities and Exchange Commission allowed the investment banks to borrow 30 times their equity base against overvalued collateral. The requirement of quarterly adjustments of asset values to reflect market fluctuations was retained, leaving the more aggressively borrowed companies as sitting ducks to short sellers such as those Lewis wrote about.

The rating agencies approved many hundreds of billions of dollars of debt that they knew to be practically worthless. These were sold as if they came from solid issuers, with the insurance industry then picking up billions of easy dollars on swaps it must have known could blow up with any agitation.

Everyone failed. The conduct of Goldman Sachs was questionable. Its former chairman, the Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, acted bizarrely, rushing about like a headless chicken, buying failed assets instead of preferred shares in the banks that had invested in such assets — the formula devised by the Roosevelt administration in the Thirties. He assisted in salvaging the creditors of Bear Sterns, let Lehman Brothers go to the wall and took good care of his company's own coat-tails.

I used occasionally to encounter Alan Greenspan in the early 2000s and I once asked him (during an intermission at Carnegie Hall) whether he wasn't concerned that the country had no savings. He said he was not. The public, he maintained, would do better out of rising house values than from the stingy interest rate his Federal Reserve had allowed as a return from deposit-taking institutions. My diffident reference to economic cycles brought the assurance that monetary policy would mitigate their effects. Politicians, government departments, agency heads, board chairmen and regulators are responsible for translating the national interest into public policy and enacting and enforcing that policy. Businessmen are there to make profits and obey the law. Despite all the nauseating antics of the corporate governance charlatans, who effectively sell priggishness and collectivisation of executive responsibility instead of financial performance, it is not the purpose of corporate America to divine and pursue public policy, beyond assuring that it does not affront it.

Once the Congress, the administration and the Federal Reserve had gone for broke on home-ownership, when trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed debt representing almost no equity were poured out, a senior Citigroup official infamously said: "When the music is playing, everyone has to dance." That is not what one hopes to hear from the head of one of the world's greatest banks. But most businessmen are Buggin's Turn intramural politicians, not auxiliary 

national leaders.