I'm as upset as anyone by the financial crisis(es?) of the last several years, but I'm even more upset by the lack of mathematical sophistication of those in charge. I'm not at all confident that these folks have a clue, in which case any cure they propose is highly likely to be worse than the disease. Given that these people are often from the best universities (Ivy League, etc.), I think their innumeracy demonstrates that our university educational system has failed society miserably, at least when it comes to some relatively fundamental mathematical concepts. Example 1. A pronouncement that the stock market crash of last Thursday was caused by a "negative feedback loop". Of course, it was far more likely to have been caused by a "positive feedback loop"; negative feedback loops are typically self-stabilizing, while positive feedback loops are the ones that explode exponentially. Example 2. After all the incessant talk of "chaos" and "fractals" over the past 30+ years, these basic ideas still don't seem to have percolated into brains of the intelligentsia. When a system is chaotic, there may be no amount of "regulation" that can fix it. If a butterfly wing flap can cause a hurricane to hit New Orleans instead of Tallahassee, what do you expect a regulator to do, kill all the butterflies with DDT? Example 3. We've known since Gödel that every sufficiently powerful logical system can have undecidable consequences. In the mean time, we've lowered the bar for "sufficiently powerful" to a very low level by showing that extremely simple systems qualify -- this is particularly so if we consider "practically undecidable" instead of just "undecidable". Furthermore, the source of this undecidability is (in effect) the ability of the system to model & reason about itself. This provides a powerful heuristic: the first place to look for instability in a system is where a system is attempting to regulate itself -- e.g., Congress trying to make rules that apply to Congress itself. How is it that someone can graduate from a top university with a major in economics or law today and not be aware of these three concepts? How could someone who didn't understand these concepts _ever_ be expected to design regulations that might make things better? I'm not ranting about regulation, per se. I fully support the concept of umpires who enforce rules, but these rules have to be very carefully designed. Such rule design is more important than the design of a modern jetliner, and deserves computer-aided design tools that are at least as sophisticated as those used by Boeing in designing jetliners.