Martin Wolf:

The UK's fiscal position, with a deficit of 14 per cent of gross domestic product forecast by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for 2010, is radically unsustainable. Big spending cuts and tax increases, relative to GDP, are inevitable.

Paul Krugman:

Lost decade, anyone?

Mike Shedlock:

Today, Riksbank, Sweden's central bank cut the deposit rate to -0.25%, effectively charging savers interest on deposited money.

Ruins of the Second Gilded Age:

Martins, who creates his images with long exposures but without digital maniupulation, traveled from rural Georgia to suburban California, visiting large construction projects that began during the speculative boom years and then came to a sudden halt, often half-finished, when the housing and securities markets collapsed.

The abandoned or stalled developments -- and Martins's photos of them -- can be seen as signs of the hubris (and occasional criminality) that typified the boom and the economic and human damage that remained in its wake.

Tom Vanderbilt:

Sure, people were gullible, living beyond their means as Edmund Andrews admits to doing. But as Alyssa Katz reminds us, the real estate bubble was also a crime scene. The only trouble is delineating where crime ended and social policy began.

Richard Florida:

One thing we know about crises is they frequently bring about significant changes in the system of housing tenure. The Great Depression and New Deal innovations in housing finance and housing policy, plus the post-war boom and infrastructure building, brought a massive shift toward single family homeownership. My hunch is it's time for new hybrid forms of housing tenure which mix the benefits of ownership with the flexibility of renting.

Michael Spence:

What can we expect as the world’s economy emerges from its most serious downturn in almost a century?

Lower growth is the best guess for the medium term. It seems most likely, but no one really knows.

It is not inconceivable that the baby will be thrown out with the bath water.

Joel Stein:

There is so much you can't know about your spouse when you get married, like that one day she will want to eat her placenta.

As the sharp, stabbing pain, fear, and panic associated with rapid and visible blood loss is superseded by a panoply of chronic ailments and a general sense of unwellness, Robert Skidelsky reviews Martin Wolf's "Fixing Global Finance":

After the collapse of the dot-com boom in 2000, the US became a much less desirable place for direct foreign investment. So East Asian countries, especially China, started to buy US Treasury bonds.

In short, it was via their impact on the financing of the federal deficit that Chinese savings made it possible for the US consumer to go on a spending spree.

The fact is that the present system has suited the United States -- specifically the power holders in the United States -- just as much as it has those in China. The phrase "it has enabled the Americans to live beyond their means" is too vague to be useful. One needs to ask: which Americans? Certainly many middle- and low-income American households have been given opportunities to borrow beyond their means.

Ginia Bellafante:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

Decius:

Sometimes the market drives off a cliff.

John Lanchester:

It's becoming traditional at this point to argue that perhaps the financial crisis will be good for us, because it will cause people to rediscover other sources of value. I suspect this is wishful thinking, or thinking about something which is quite a long way away, because it doesn't consider just how angry people are going to get when they realize the extent of the costs we are going to carry for the next few decades.

I get the strong impression, talking to people, that the penny hasn't fully dropped.

Recently:

I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust. I had no idea.

Louis Kahn:

A good idea that doesn't happen is no idea at all.

The World Finance Crisis & the American Mission