Doug,

However, I cannot consider those economic decisions that people made entirely foolish. If they were all being so very stupid, it would be a market failure. Instead if you accept the short-term bias (What happens in the near-past will continue to happen in the future.), those decisions were entirely rational. In fact some people made huge sums of money because they accepted short term bias. It was such a huge opportunity that people began to quit their jobs in order to speculate and flip houses.

The key question is, “What entities threw the economic system into the imbalance that created the initial opportunities, and what entities maintained the imbalance that drove everyone in the country engaged in unsustainable and collectively idiotic behavior?”