Of the many sadnesses associated with leaving a job, the largest may be the aching void one feels when one ponders all the missed opportunities.

For those of us lucky enough to be journalists, that means people not interviewed, journeys not taken, articles not written.

It means, too, the intellectual missed opportunity; the failure properly and faithfully to convey the full complexity of what is happening in the world. Which is a nice of way of saying, the screw-ups.

The errors, the stupid mistakes, the missed stories; from the misspelt name to the great, stonking strategic, epochal exercise in editorial misjudgment. And yes, reader, I have done them all.

Space is too limited to allow a full litany of my frailties. But as I take my leave after four years on this paper, I feel an obligation to offer a cathartic confession of some of the stinkier ones.

I'm haunted by a column I wrote in the spring of 2006 in which I forecast proudly that there was no conceivable way that Henry Paulson would become US Treasury Secretary. This was based on exhaustive reporting through the White House and elsewhere and it actually managed to move markets a little as I blundered on from the flawed operating assertion to some useful speculation on what it might mean for the US dollar.

So when, literally within days, Mr Paulson was duly nominated as US Treasury Secretary, the dollar's gains were matched only by the loss to my credibility.

I take no comfort from the fact that if only President Bush had listened to me and not gone near Hurricane Hank, the world might be in a better place today. No, my judgment at the time was positive, not normative. And it was wrong.

I was also convinced for a while, for some unaccountable reason, that when Paul Wolfowitz was forced out of the World Bank in 2007, his replacement would be not Robert Zoellick, as most informed observers seemed to expect, but an obscure Afghan economist. Mr Zoellick is, of course, now president of the World Bank and the Afghan economist remains in happy anonymity.

I look back with no joy on my confident rejection a year ago of the idea that the current economic downturn might turn into something quite like the Great Depression. Like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I dismissed the mounting evidence of mortal financial damage as a kind of flesh wound to the world economy.

Needless to say, it is evident that we are now comfortably into the second year of the longest recession since the 1930s.

But my biggest intellectually missed opportunity was the one that essentially informed so much of my economic commentary in the past couple of years. And one, I suppose in my defence, I could say was shared by quite large number of economists more qualified than I. It was a faith in the idea called the Great Moderation.

This is the term economists use to describe the period that began about 25 years ago. After the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Inflation of the 1960s and 1970s, the Great Moderation was a period in which things just seemed to keep going right. It was a sort of macroeconomic Goldilocks, in which, thanks to benign policy and microeconomic changes business cycles were long and healthy - with extended periods of solid expansion followed by short, shallow recessions. An end to boom and bust, as it were.

I began singing the virtues of the Great Moderation in fact just as it began to fall apart about two years ago. Now we have the probability of a deep, long, nasty recession, presumably to be followed by a sudden upsurge in inflation.

My other errors can be put down mostly to simple foolishness, but it is worth pondering what happened to the Great Moderation. How did we lose it? Where did it go wrong?

The most likely culprit seems to be the phenomenon itself, or at least the economic sentiment it induced. The extended era of low volatility in economic activity encouraged a more and more relaxed attitude towards risk. As memories of past recessions faded into distant memory, financial markets came to be dominated by people who had literally never experienced a serious downturn. The appetite for bigger and bolder bets grew larger. Policymakers became increasingly sure that they could fine-tune the economy with interest rate tweaks here and there. And yes, perhaps we placed too much faith in the idea that markets would simply correct themselves whenever anything got out of hand.

In short, the best explanation for our lost prosperity is that the mindset was one of complacency and we are now paying the price.

But of course, I could be wrong about that, too.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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