We used to kid around at the bank where I worked that the same mistakes coild be made, over and over again, about every seven years. The reasoning was that employees turn over in their jobs at about that rate. So after about seven years, there's no one left in the organization to remember what bad decisions or incompetence lead to the last incident.

It's never turned out to be seven years. But there have been repeated errors by the financial community on more like a 10-15 year cycle.

Even if the regulators were smart enough to figure out some of these new financial products, they too turn over at a rate that nobody remembers how bad the mistakes hurt the last time around.

Maybe the old saying really holds true. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. My next-door neighbor here in TV is a retired chief financial officer of a large school district in Michigan. She tells the story of investment bankers trying to sell her on the significantly enhanced returns she could get by allocating a portion of the district's investment portfolio to derivative securities based on sub-prime home mortgages. She declined because she simply wasn't comfortable placing the school district's assets at risk on securities based on the crazy mortgage lending she had seen reported going on all over the country. She had more than a little trouble convincing her school board that the opportunity for increased returns was illusory in her opinion, that someone would ultimately be the loser with these derivative securities, and that she didn't want the loser to be the school district. She was right. It was a duck.