There are many such disasters.  Among them the Great Depression, the decade long consequence of the Federal Reserve Board's failure to prevent the shrinkage of the US money supply.   See: https://www.hoover.org/research/feds-depression-and-birth-new-deal 

In more recent times we had Brooksley Born, head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), blocked from regulating over the counter derivatives and credit default swaps that resulted in  financial panic and economic collapse.  Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt conspired to have Congress block Brooksley Born from doing her job.  The four dumbshit officials told Congress that "markets are self-regulating."  Greenspann when later questioned by Congress admitted that his ideology "had a flaw."  http://www.shoppbs.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/interviews/born.html 

The Fed has abandoned effective financial regulation and helped to kill the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that had kept commercial and investment banking separate.  It is ironic that it was the formerly progressive Democrat Party in the clutches of the Clintons that repealed the progressive Glass-Stegall Act in 1999, thus setting up the line of financial troubles that caused the Fed to pump out money for 12 years in an effort to stabilize the financial system.  Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner's 2011 book, Reckless Endangerment documents the failure of financial regulation.