There is nothing like a crisis to elicit that remarkable human deftness at laying blame and dodging it. But maybe the flurry of financial crisis finger-pointing obscures an inconvenient truth—that nobody really understood the size and fury of this storm until it was fast upon us.

John Train, investment adviser and author if the financial classic, The Money Masters, thus described in 1994 the selling climax, the last (and first) of the 12 “choruses” of the market: “The torrent crashes down the hills. Some stocks give up in a day their gains for years, and drop 50 per cent in a week. It is so sudden and so awful that, for a while, many investors cannot quite believe it… Each time, investors become convinced that the skies will never clear or the sun shine again. But it always does.”

Students at the Stanford Business School divine the true mission of hedge funds, revealed at the very end of their follies video here.