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It was painful to watch these heroes of our national pastime confess by their evasions that their record-setting performances not only were the product of hard work on the field and in the gym but were boosted by steroid injections in a dark corner of the locker room (and one of them, Palmeiro, later actually failed a drug test).

Almost five years later, on January 13, 2010, in another committee hearing room just down the hall, Congress was at it again, with another panel investigating steroid use—this time financial steroids. The scene was eerily similar, but instead of baseball stars sitting biceps-to-biceps, it was investment bankers sitting briefcase-to-briefcase. Their huge bonuses and paydays were the Wall Street equivalent of grand-slam home runs—home runs also hit, it was suspected, with artificial stimulants. Some of America’s biggest financial sluggers jammed together at one long witness table: Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, and Morgan Stanley chairman John Mack. This was the first public hearing of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

Here is how Reuters described what happened:

Wall Street’s chiefs acknowledged taking on “too much risk” … but stopped short of an apology as they sparred with a commission looking into the origins of the financial crisis …

With U.S. unemployment near a 26-year high after the worst recession in decades, public fury is growing over the cost of U.S. taxpayer bailouts and huge bonuses for bankers, now that the banking industry has stabilized from the 2008 meltdown.

Phil Angelides, chairman of the commission and a former state treasurer of California, confronted the pugnacious, armwaving Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, over his firm’s pre-meltdown practices.

Angelides compared Goldman’s practice of creating, then betting against, certain subprime mortgage-backed securities to “selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer.”

Just as baseball players in the 1990s injected themselves with steroids to build muscle artificially for the purpose of hitting more home runs, our government injected steroids into the economy in the form of cheap credit so that Wall Street could do more gambling and Main Street could do more home buying and unskilled workers could do more home-building. The fastest-growing job sectors during the steroid-injected bubble years of the early 2000s were construction, housing, real estate, homeland security, financial services, health care, and public employment—all of them fueled by low interest rates and deficit spending. New value-creating industries grew very little.

Warren Buffett likes to say that when the tide goes out, you see who isn’t wearing a bathing suit. The economic tide went out with the financial meltdown and deep recession at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and it showed with brutal clarity who was swimming naked.

It was us.

Thanks to the peace dividend, the creation of the dot-com industry, the portable-computing and cell-phone industries, and the tax increase pushed through by President Bill Clinton, the first decade after the end of the Cold War was, on balance, positive for America. We almost erased the deficit, and employment grew steadily. The Clinton administration tried to pass an energy tax and nearly succeeded in doing so. Welfare was reformed, and corporate America seemed to be adjusting and adapting to the flat world, because it had no choice. Alas, the second decade after the Cold War ended—the first decade of the twenty-first century—was not so benign. There is really no other way to say it: By the standards of elementary prudence and our own history, we went nuts.

When America failed to see what a profound challenge the end of the Cold War posed, this could be chalked up to ignorance or inattention. We simply didn’t understand the world in which we were living. But when we decided to