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We just passed the first anniversary of an important, if little noted, meeting where the plans for what would become the government's attempted bailout of the banking system were first hatched. One year ago, a group of venture capitalists, Silicon Valley executives and professors at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research met to discuss the looming crisis in finance and debate a possible bailout. It was early for such talk. Bear Stearns had not yet collapsed. Hank Paulson was still deriding the notion of a bailout and knotting his brow about moral hazard. But the group gathered at Stanford, which included Larry Summers and Long-Term Capital Management veteran and Nobel laureate Myron Scholes, saw what was coming: the government would eventually spend a lot of tax payer money in an attempt to clean up the credit mess.