This is the best summary of the present economic crisis. To get more details read Dick Morris' Fleeced and Ellen Brown's Web of Debt . This article and the two books show how to get out of mess, also. Fred A Small Bridge... The global economic problem is the problem of too much debt: personal, corporate, municipal, state and national. And there is no "solution," except (perhaps) for a "system re-set." The case for a "Jubilee" year of debt forgiveness... By Dr. Robert Moynihan, reporting from Rome Yes, the problem is the debt. The debt is not large, it is colossal. And there are only two possibilities for paying off the debt: (1) many, many years of belt-tightening and lower consumption (read, global depression); and (2) an abrupt repudiation of the debt, and the total collapse of world trade, with an effect perhaps not completely unlike the collapse of trade that came with the fall of the Roman Empire in the late 5th century, followed by the centu