At the bottom of the financial crisis--powerful minds with strange ideas

Keynes' biographer, Robert Skidelsky, echoes Keynes' assertion that ideas are more powerful than vested interests:

"The root cause of the present crisis lies in the intellectual failure of economics,” Mr. Skidelsky writes. “It was the wrong ideas of economists which legitimized the deregulation of finance, and it was the deregulation of finance which led to the credit explosion which collapsed into the credit crunch. It is hard to convey the harm done by the recent dominant school of New Classical economics. Rarely in history can such powerful minds have devoted themselves to such strange ideas."

(From Dwight Garner's NYT book review.)  Yes, and Alan Greenspan admits his powerful mind held some of these strange ideas.