5. Derivatives Mania

Derivatives, including the mortgage-backed securities and swaps that turned banks like Lehman into ashtrays, have been around for a long time. Long enough that there was plenty of opportunity to poorly regulate them. Just before the decade began, in 1999, Congress exempted over-the-counter (translation: “the worst”) derivatives from regulation, at the urging of, among others, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. By October 2008, “the Maestro” was apologizing for the mess that resulted.

4. The Subprime/Real Estate Crash

Any attentive high-school economics student will tell you that every boom is followed by bust. But this being the Decade of the Worst, we didn’t have any old real estate bust. We had a crash accelerated by all kinds of exotic mortgages, their existence a product of years of regulatory neglect, as well as subprime mortgages sold to people who could not afford them. It took No. 3 to turn a bad downturn into an economy-crunching disaster.

3. The Bear Stearns-Lehman Brothers Implosion

By an accident of history, Bear Stearns was the first major Wall Street bank to suffer from its own greed-induced venture into toxic derivatives and mortgage-backed securities. So Bear got the Federal Reserve bailout and the sale to JPMorgan in March 2008, while Lehman was allowed to go bankrupt six months later. To this day, nobody can adequately explain why the Fed allowed Lehman to sink, and the ethically challenged Bear to survive.

2. The Market Meltdown of 2008

Fortunately, for those of us who like the simple life (i.e., those without savings), a cyclical decline in the market that commenced in October 2007 when the market indices peaked turned into a rout when Bear, Lehman, and the rest of the major banks imploded because of their serial incompetence. By March, when Bear self-destructed, the market was down 50 percent. All the gains of the 1990s were gone. Even brainy John Thain couldn’t rescue Merrill Lynch—or himself. That meant we were doomed.

1. The Great Recession

Now we come to the granddaddy of big stories of the decade, all that we’ve been building up to for the past 10 years. Stagnation, high unemployment, and the worst market crash since 1929 combined to give “great” to this particular recession. Hey, it didn’t happen without a lot of help, giving a cyclical twist in the business cycle the odor of premeditation. Where would we have been without the bankers screwing up and betting their Hamptons mansions on mortgage-backed securities it took a supercomputer not to understand? Or the real estate boom and bust that the predatory lenders exacerbated, with help from somnolent regulators?

One bright spot: Economic calamity brings out the best in moviemakers (James Cagney and Forty-Second Street in the 1930s, Up in the Air knocking 'em dead today). So grab your unemployment check and head for the multiplex!