The financial meltdown was not brought on by sleaze and greed. According to writer, Daniel Gross, it was caused by dumb money. Plugging his latest book, he explains more here.

"The Dumb Money creed rested on four pillars: perpetually low interest rates, perpetually rising asset prices (especially for housing), borrowers of all types remaining perpetually current, and perpetually strong markets for debt. The high priests of this cult were the nation's central bankers. In the Era of Cheap Money (the fall of 2001 through June 2004), Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan convinced us that we could have low interest rates despite inflationary pressures and global growth. His successor, Ben Bernanke, in 2002 began trying to convince us that we might have as much to fear from deflation as from inflation. Bernanke also provided intellectual fortification for the argument that one of our greatest vices-a tendency to debt-financed consumption-was actually something of a virtue ... Looking back, the investors who believed the stories told by Madoff and Stanford-that they could deliver steady, positive, market-beating returns in any type of climate, despite the manifest failure of virtually every other money manager to do so-were obviously foolish. But our best financial minds also spun tales and theories with great assurance, making seemingly irrational and unprecedented activity seem completely sensible. And we bought them."

Gross has a point. But it wasn't just the business leaders and regulators. It was also the general public who used their houses as the equivalent of automated teller machines and used their property to borrow big time and buy shares with debt. There was clearly an expectation that the good time would last forever, that tragedies like the Great Depression, or indeed any meltdown would never happen again. And that was just dumb.

Gross has a point. But the stupidy has to be shared.