After Lehman Brothers’ 2008 bankruptcy precipitated the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve was roundly slammed for having been asleep at the wheel at the very time a major economic crisis was brewing.

Why had it paid so little attention to the housing market bubble and the associated problems in plain sight with subprime lending?

Why did it underestimate the clear message Bear Stearns’ troubles in March 2008 were sending about a strained banking system?

Judging by all the policy mistakes Jerome Powell’s Fed is making, one has to wonder whether next year it will again be accused of having been asleep at the wheel when another economic crisis was brewing.

It might be asked: After raising interest rates at the fastest pace in decades, why did the Fed keep going without paying due thought to the long and variable lags with which monetary policy is known to operate?

Why did it continue to turn a blind eye to the dramatic swings in the money supply it had created?

And why did it largely ignore the financial-market strains its policy was causing as well as the unfolding of a major Chinese economic crisis that risked tipping the world into recession?

One of the Powell Fed’s defining characteristics is following a strictly data-dependent monetary policy: Each of its interest-rate decisions is largely based on the latest economic numbers for wage and price inflation, economic growth and employment.

Never mind the one thing we do know about monetary policy is interest hikes take between 12 and 18 months to have their full effect on the economy.

Armed with that knowledge, prudence would dictate that after raising rates a full 5 percentage points in the short space of a year, before taking further rate action the Fed should be waiting to see the economic impact of the hikes it’s already made.

Milton Friedman famously taught that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

Had the Fed heeded this teaching, it wouldn’t have paved the way for multi-decade-high inflation in 2022 by allowing the broad money supply to balloon by a staggering 40% between the beginning of 2020 and the end of 2021.

Despite that experience, the Fed is now letting the money supply contract at a pace unprecedented in the post-war period.

That could be setting us up for the opposite problem of great economic weakness and another period of flirting with inflation.

At this year’s start, a number of regional banks, including most notably Silicon Valley Bank, failed as a result of large interest-rate-induced losses on their bond portfolios.

At the same time, the troubled commercial-property space now threatens to add further banking-system strains in a world of higher interest rates and high vacancy rates with more people choosing to work from home in the post-COVID world.

This has to be of particular concern considering that $500 billion a year in such loans will need to be rolled over during the coming two years.

Yet these looming financial-system problems have not deterred the Fed from its newfound monetary-policy religion.

It barely mentions these risks in its policy statements, and it keeps compounding these risks by continuing to raise interest rates.

In a recent moment of candor, President Joe Biden correctly labeled the Chinese economy a “ticking time bomb” now that its outsized property- and credit-market bubble has burst.

China is the world’s second-largest economy and until recently was its principal engine of economic growth, so the country’s unfolding economic crisis has the potential of throwing the world into recession.

But these real external economic risks barely enter the Fed’s thinking — as underlined by the fact that, in his recent Jackson Hole speech, Powell did not so much as mention the Chinese economy as a risk worthy of monitoring.

If our economy succumbs to a recession next year as a result of a series of egregious Fed policy mistakes, of one thing you can be sure: The Fed will mount the defense that nobody could reasonably have anticipated the recession.

American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Desmond Lachman was a deputy director in the International Monetary Fund’s Policy Development and Review Department and the chief emerging-market economic strategist at Salomon Smith Barney.