On the wall in my office is a going-away present from when I left Newsweek — seven cover stories I wrote in the late 1980s and early nineties. Someone walked into my office yesterday and noticed something I hadn’t, the eerie familiarity of two covers from 1990:

Bonfire of the S&Ls: How much will You Pay? Are the Banks Next? (May 20, 1990)
The Real Estate Bust (December 1, 1990)

There are many differences but some strange similarities. The connections between the real estate and financial markets created a destructive downward spiral for both. And back then, the two big lessons were:
1) Don’t ever invest as if things are always going to go up
2) When regulation grows too lax, greed overruns the system
This isn’t a crisis of greed. It’s a crisis of memory.