“The crisis came from causes not captured by the new Keynesian models used at the Fed, such as excessive risk-taking in financial markets and failures of financial regulation and supervision. We had to figure out how to incorporate the effects of the crisis in our models.”

“I’m sorry that light bulbs didn’t go off in my head a couple of years before they really did, but there was no question. I was hearing stuff that was really scary. And I wouldn’t have seen it in the data.”

* * *

Those are the confessions of the ex-chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, and his successor, Janet Yellen. They are contained in Nicholas Lemann’s profile of Mrs. Yellen in the latest number of the New Yorker. It’s a wonderful story, even if it adds up to a plea that Mrs. Yellen needs to be more of a politician. It’s a reminder of, among other things, that they just didn’t see the crisis coming. It just wasn’t in the Fed’s data. And no wonder. They weren’t paying attention to Julie Satow.

Ms. Satow was the real estate reporter of The New York Sun.* She broke the story that generated the most vituperous protests of any cable we printed during the first decade of the 21st century. She was writing about the latest report from the real estate industry in New York City, boasting that in the past six years the price of an apartment in Manhattan had nearly doubled to $1.4 million. Ms. Satow had taken the prices and refigured them in ounces of gold, resulting in a five-column headline at the top of page one: “Gold Value of Apartments Sinks.”

What a cataract of complaints greeted the story, which was accompanied by a chart showing that the actual — meaning the gold — value of apartments was plunging even while prices in Federal Reserve scrip were soaring. Please mark the date: January 3, 2008. Within nine months, the real estate crisis, triggered by vast lending at inflated prices for dubious real estate, was upon us. In other words, we’d all have been better off had Ms. Satow been chairing the Fed. Ms. Yellen mightn’t have seen it in the data. Mr. Bernanke’s models mightn’t have captured it. Gold, however, was onto it.

It was back in December 2005 that we issued the editorial called “The Bush Dollar.” The editor of the Interest Rate Observer, James Grant, had just published in our pages a warning that the greenback’s value in gold had so far plunged 46% over the course of George W. Bush’s presidency. President Bush, we suggested, would be wise to spend less time worrying about the war than about the dollar. Since then we’ve issued more than 125 editorials stressing the primacy of this issue, largely in respect of constitutional first principles.

We are not so obsessed with specie and constitutional principles as to ignore the credit and regulatory questions confronting the Fed on any given day (for starters, we pore over the parchment of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer every other week). All we’re saying here is that it strikes us that there’s something off for Mr. Bernanke and Mrs. Yellen to fetch up at this date blithely talking about how they didn’t see trouble in the data and continuing to ignore the signals in gold. The fact is that a search always ends in the last place one looks.

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* She now writes a column on real estate for the New York Times.