Recently, I read Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, which is about the 2008 financial crisis. I’ve also been reading a number of the regular investment commentaries as the markets have gone through their latest chaotic period.

The financial crises of 2008 and 2011 have in common the people who had the foresight to see either or both of them coming. However, the number of commentators who claimed that they saw it coming after the event is in inverse proportion to the number of people who really did see it coming. Leading the pack in espousing their hindsight have been, of course, our political representatives. Forgive me if I say that I find their posturing rather unattractive.

If foresight is about predicting, and hindsight is about what you may call ‘postdicting’ (if the term takes off I shall claim credit for it), what term do we use for people who are in the thick of a crisis as it happens and have to make difficult and immediate decisions? Do we call the stage between foresight and hindsight ‘insight’? Probably not. Or do we call it just ‘sight’?

It is being in those battles, and learning what we did right and what we did wrong, that makes us better advisors. A wise man observed ‘people prefer to pay for experience than to take advice’. Experiences analysed with the benefit of hindsight lead us to have more foresight and insight the next time battle is joined. However, if the person at the heart of the battle is learning on the job, and may not be the best qualified, this can be a problem.

‘It is easy to pick a scapegoat. Was it really the bankers who caused the crisis?’

We need to remember President Theodore Roosevelt’s words: ‘It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marked by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming… who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly…’

Take Henry Paulson in 2008, then Secretary to the US Treasury. You could argue that, even with his knowledge of the industry, he made mistakes – notably, it is said, the sacrifice of Lehman Brothers. But in the fast-moving couple of weeks in September 2008, he had to learn from his mistakes, and he still salvaged some enormous institutions from what would have been the financial rubble.

In difficult times, it is easy to pick a scapegoat. Was it really the bankers who caused those crises of 2008 and 2011? Or should each one of us also take responsibility for enjoying credit that was too easy and rising housing prices at rates that could not be sustained but which made us feel wealthy and confident? We must learn the right lessons from the last financial crisis to prepare us for the next.