The obvious stopping point is when the view is from the stands.

John Kenneth Galbraith 1908-2006

One pleasure [in researching The Great Crash] was in the discovery in one of its manifold forms that the emperor has no clothes. Or, in more precise terms, it came from learning how the fashionable, smug, secure and pompous could arrange their own demise. This, after 1929, was the fate of the greatest men of the financial world -- of Richard Whitney, the vice president, later president, of the New York Stock Exchange whose brother George was a greatly eminent partner at Morgan's; of Albert H. Wiggin, the head of the Chase National Bank; of Charles E. Mitchell, the head of the National City Bank of New York; and of the great men of the investment house of Goldman Sachs, including, among others, their counsel and ally John Foster Dulles. All were riding the boom, as were the less pretentious speculators. All, with the exception of Wiggin, who was short in the stock of his own bank, were firm in their belief that the values they were helping create by their own mindless optimism were real. Every suggestion to the contrary was dismissed as subversive negativism. The Crash was a violent collision with reality from which none escaped. Mitchell only unexpectedly stayed out of jail. Whitney, the most intransigent defender of the Stock Exchange against any and all government regulation, was, as I have said, sent to Sing Sing. Wiggin was sacked. By investing in their own beliefs, all except Wiggin had ruthlessly defrauded themselves. The threat to men of great dignity, privilege, and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth.

[from A Life in Our Times, his memoir. I wonder what a public man so wise and committed thought when he saw history repeat itself, over and over, despite his own best efforts to prevent it?]