Dean Baker is mad at Robert Rubin for suggesting that “few, if any” people saw the financial meltdown coming.

I’d say that there are two levels to this. First, a lot of people — including Dean, me, Calculated Risk, and others — saw that there was a huge housing bubble. It remains amazing that so many alleged experts failed to see the obvious.

What’s going on now, however, is beyond that: the “financial accelerator,” with deleveraging causing a credit crunch that forces further deleveraging, and now threatens to produce a sort of pancake collapse of the whole system, was not, I think, so widely foreseen.

In the larger sense, though, Dean is right. Even now, those who saw the risks are somewhat marginalized in public discussion, while those who airily dismissed all the warnings are still treated as men of good judgment.

Remind you of anything?