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In his blog post yesterday, Paul Krugman made the point that Janet Yellin was one of the few economists who correctly saw the peril of last decade’s housing bubble before it burst. Krugman thesis is that where Yellin fell short was in thinking the damage could be contained: What she and others missed, he theorizes, was the”debt overhang”.

Look at the crisis in basic terms: The financial disaster of 2008 wiped out lots of wealth, especially that of middle-class home owners. What wasn’t wiped out was their debt: The worth of the property many people had borrowed against was gone, but what they owed remained. One thing has become clear in the ensuing years: The banks that were at the center of the crisis were not going to take the hit. After being bailed out by the taxpayers, they have resisted re-working mortgages, mangled the foreclosure process and stubbornly resisted regulation aimed at curtailing their riskier practices.

With a sluggish economy and a too-high unemployment rate, wealth creation for the majority is problematic. Meanwhile, the great engine of wealth creation, the government’s fiscal policies, has been chained down by crackpot economic theories issued from the crazy-talk mouths of politicians.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Our modern-day leaders concern themselves with Sharia law, barbed-wire-topped border walls and the naughty-bits of females while the economy of this great nation is picked apart and plundered by a small group with outsized influence.

Bubbles are pretty while they float lightly as gossamer spheres. They are pretty damn ugly when they burst and cover us with a sticky film.