You mentioned two men who were dead-wrong, or at least who saw neither the ’29 crash nor the Great Depression coming:

Irving Fisher [is] remembered for having made one of the worst and most ill-timed ever stock market calls that cost him his reputation and millions in the subsequent crash — on October 17, 1929 (a week before Black Thursday) when he said “stock prices had reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” . . .

[E]ven Keynes was wrong in 1927 when he said: “We will not have any more crashes in our time.”

But, you mention nothing of the men — F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises — who got it right and who actually did see the crises coming back then, or of the men — Ron Paul, Peter Schiff, et al. — who saw the ’87 crash and the current crises coming. All these fellows are known as the Austrian economists (or, the Misesians), and I believe it’s a mistake to omit them from the discussion of who saw the crises coming, who didn’t, and what we should learn from it.

Friedman, Keynes, Greenspan, et al., believed in using the central government’s monopoly on the use of force to exact political or economic change; the Austrians do not. That is the main difference between those who got it right and those who were dead-wrong. Non-interventionism.

Another huge difference is that Friedman, Keynes, and Greenspan were in favor of destroying the currency through inflation to one extent or another; the Austrians are not: they believe in hard commodity-backed currency to keep the govt. “honest,” or rather, to keep it from spending money it doesn’t have just by printing worthless “money,” artificially lowering interest rates, etc. Greenspan and Friedman may have given lip-service to some of this, but just look at the body of their work to see their true stripes.

Oh, and one more thing: WWII did not end the Great Depression. The belief that it did is a form of the classic “broken window” fallacy. War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or plague brings. -Ludwig von Mises

“Between 1943 and 1945, some two-fifths of the labor force—including the armed forces, civilian employess of the armed forces, people who worked in the military supply industries, and unemployed—was producing neither consumer goods nor capital goods. That was not all, of course; the tax monies of the remaining 60 percent went to fund the activities of the 40 percent that were not producing things consumers needed. All of this amounted to a dramatic loss of material wealth.” (Thomas E. Woods, Jr., The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, 2004, p. 155. Emphasis in the original.)

“People believed they were prosperous in World War II because they were piling up large amounts of unspendable income—in the form of paper money and government bonds. They confused this accumulation of paper assets with real wealth. Incredibly, most economic statisticians and historians make the same error when they measure the standard of living of World War II by the largely unspendable ‘national income’ of the period.” (Economist George Reisman, as quoted by Woods in The Politically Incorrect Guide, p. 156.)

Other than the tragic omission of the anti-State, pro-Liberty, anti-inflation, anti-Fed, anti-war economists — and their pre-crisis work and predictions — I really enjoyed your essay, as I normally do all of them.