I have become an economics junkie. I used to spend my free-time looking for information on video games. Now I read the paper and listen to economists.

If you want to learn about economic philosophies, this is a good time for it. There is ton of information out there as everyone tries to figure out what happened to us and what will come next.

Listening to the news last week, something started to nag at me.

We spend a lot of time discussing the numbers and economic measures we have used for years. Unemployment, consumer confidence, GDP, car sales, shipping and manufacturing indexes, oil and commodity prices, home construction and sales, default rates, etc.

We spend a lot of time on the numbers that we know but are they really meaningful for this crisis? If these numbers were so meaningful, why didnt they let us see the crisis before it became a crisis?

If you only watched mainstream news, you might believe that this crisis was caused by a few naughty poor people who bought homes they could not pay for. Im sorry but there arent enough poor people in America to have created a crisis on this scale.

No, the problems are because of paper assets not real ones. This crisis is because of the investment banks who took real assets like houses and turned them into a stream of paper assets - mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps and the like. Who took a $1 asset and turned it into a $10 loan.

Government regulators like Alan Greenspan sat by while Wall Street created tens of trillions of dollars worth of these things. Most of them are unregulated and unmeasured. We dont know who has them, what they are, how much there is or what they are worth. (Greenspan refused to regulate them because he didnt want to slow economic creativity with inefficient government regulation -- I hope you are enjoying your slice of that creativity. He will be dead soon so you can have his piece too.)

What started to bug me is that the things we know are the tip of the iceberg. We are spending so much effort focusing on the visible tip of the iceberg that is floating above the water and you have to look hard to see any discussion about the much larger danger lurking beneath the waves.

It seems like we are spending too much time focusing on the things we know, the economics of the past, when our problems are due to the things we dont know, the stuff we created after Bush became president.

I am encouraged that the Obama administration seems to be looking below the iceberg's tip. When he talks about Japan's lost decade, I feel better. Maybe he will have the courage to force the banks to fess up so we can have an honest discussion of how bad things are.

But I worry that Obama is making a mistake by not spreading awareness of these financial instruments and where they came from. People dont know what a CDS is. If Obama suddenly says Citigroup is insolvent (like AIG was) because of the CDS's and we need to take action, it will be a hard sell unless people understand it better. Instead of focusing the blame, he runs the risk of taking it on himself.

Then again, maybe Jack Nicholson is right and we can't handle the truth. But I prefer to think we should put the blame where the blame belongs and not scape-goat the poor, the ethnic, the ignorant or the Messenger.