Post-Meltdown Technical Analysis?

I'm starting to gather information for an Investors' Edition of How to Lie with Charts. Looks like I have a lot to learn about technical analysis (finding patterns in charts to make hypotheses about market behavior).

I wonder:

• Did technical analysis in any way predict or fail to predict last fall's banking crisis?
• Have traders' opinions on the reliability of technical analysis changed since the meltdown?

My scientific wildass guess (SWAG) on this would be that technical analysis would miss the underlying factors that caused weakness.