As the leaders of the largest economies in the world, the CEOs of the big-name corporations and the pillars of the economics academia gather in Davos for their annual get-together under the cloud of the worst recession since the Great Depression, one thing must be clear - they had been warned of what was coming including in the very same Swiss ski resort setting, as anyone delving into the archives (Reuters in this case) would find.

And not just by Nouriel Roubini, the New York University professor who resents his Dr Doom nickname, preferring to see himself as a realist instead, and who delivered a strong warning in Davos in 2007, saying that "in the case of the US, Goldilocks is being threatened by three ugly bears," referring to a potential housing recession, higher interest rates triggering a possible credit crunch and high oil prices.

Not to steal Roubini's thunder and in no way taking away any credit from him for trying to warn the world, he was not alone in his gloomy predictions. Warren Buffett and George Soros are just two billionaire investors who've been predicting some of the same for years, but the list does not end there.

In January 2007, when the sub-prime mortgage market was yet to collapse, the president of JP Morgan Chase International, Andrew Crockett, was saying that "a lot of activities within the private sector, hedge funds, private equity - we are not sure where it's going and what it's doing. You don't quite know how they are going to be exposed if there is correction in financial markets of a substantial size. We don't know how this will happen, it can happen on geopolitical risks."

Financial services consultancy Mercer Oliver Wyman's report, made public at the same summit, said that "amid increasingly high market expectations, market values have risen more than twice as quickly as earnings growth over the past five years," warning about the unsustainability of the trend. Already at that time, many CEOs surveyed by the firm for its report were increasingly wary of the rising debt in developed countries.

Yet few dared to raise their voices in favour of more regulation, German chancellor Angela Merkel being one of those that bucked the trend. Even EU financial markets commissioner Charlie McCreevy thought there was no need for more regulation on hedge funds, who now incidentally find themselves as everyone's favourite scapegoat for much of what went wrong in recent months.

Even Crockett, the JP Morgan banker who confessed he had not much of a clue about what was going in the private sector, said that "more rigid, more intrusive regulatory regime is not easy and in many cases it's not reliable".

It was not the first time politicians were being warned either. A year earlier in the same place, IMF managing director Rodrigo Rato told assembled world leaders: "Liquidity is substantial, interest rates are benign, risk premia are benign. But this might give complacency to policymakers, and that certainly is a risk."

Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach did not mince words either: "There is a dangerous degree of complacency, and out of that comes a surprise that does the most damage to the global economy."

Efforts to slow down lending were made by central banks, who repeatedly raised interest rates, but to no avail. In their chase after clients, banks were willing to under-price loans, European Central Bank governing council member Axel Weber said at the time.

It must have felt like trying to stop an avalanche.

In a piece earlier this week, Britain's The Guardian named the American public, but also the British one ("credit junkies of Europe"), on the list of 25 people responsible for the current economic slump. "If millions (...) had just realised they were borrowing more than they could repay then we would not be in this mess", the newspaper said.

Far from having the same kind of impact on the global stage, Eastern Europeans were no better, taking advantage of cheap credit in the same way, if on a smaller scale, luxuriating in the feeling of wealth after decades of austerity under communism.

Much of it is gone now, about 40 per cent of the world's wealth "destroyed in the last five quarters - it is an almost incomprehensible number," according to Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone Group, one of the biggest private equity investors in the world.

More than a bit misleading, though - as Mr Schwarzman well knows, an asset is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Without the goods to back it, all that wealth is nothing but paper.