Andersen's chief executive, Joe Berardino, initially admitted only to a few misjudgments, but the firm toppled when it admitted that an "expedited" shredding of Enron-related documents had taken place in its Houston office after the Securities and Exchange Commission SECC) had launched an investigation into Enron's accounting.
Neither of these shortcomings can be rapidly fixed, so the use of the new standards is bound to be fraught with bungles and misjudgments.
There were also spectacular misjudgments elsewhere, notably in Britain (by the now abolished Financial Services Authority) and in the United States.The fact that Mr Demetriades is leaving almost exactly a year after the disastrous events of March 2013 may or may not be a coincidence.
But, as we pore over the lessons of this misadventure, we do not conclude that our past misjudgments warrant a rush into the cold arms of "realism".
They had been advised to leave, but many made their own disastrous misjudgments about the severity of the storm and stayed.
"The Russians were among the few who had operational information on the ground," Mr Medish says.That co-operation led to two misjudgments.
Later, during the presidency of Mr Khatami (1997-2005), reform-minded Iranians turned on Mr Rafsanjani with such venom that he failed even to win a seat in parliament in the elections of 2000.Have the liberals lost?The price of those misjudgments and divisions will be high.
The result is a blow-by-blow account of what those who made recent British history were thinking as they did so, with no subsequent airbrushing out of the misjudgments of the moment.For the most part, Young draws on a wide assortment of politicians, civil servants, union officials, diplomats and others to piece together the subtext of British politics.
The longest serving attorney-general since the days of John Quincy Adams, she has had more than her fair share of misjudgments.
In all the talk about the American housing market and banking misjudgments, the role of oil at $140 a barrel in sparking this recession has probably been underestimated.
