Each of the last three recessions contained elements of extraordinary financial instability. For example, Savings & Loan (S&L) institutions used federally insured deposits to make reckless real estate loans in the 1980s. When the Federal Reserve raised its overnight lending rate more than 300 basis points between March 1988 and March 1989, a real estate bubble burst, hundreds upon hundreds of S&L's fell apart, and the 1990-1991 recession damaged livelihoods.
Not surprisingly, one finds comparable patterns of financial senselessness in the late 1990s and again in the mid-2000s. Never-before levels of margin debt had been