Meltdown?

Mervyn King, the Bank of England Governor, summed it up best: "Dealing with a banking crisis was difficult enough," he said the other week, "but at least there were public-sector balance sheets on to which the problems could be moved. Once you move into sovereign debt, there is no answer; there's no backstop."

After the dotcom bust, Alan Greenspan slashed US interest rates to (then) unprecedented lows, which helped dull the pain, but only at the cost of generating the housing bubble that fed sub-prime. It is not so different to the Ponzi scheme carried out by Bernard Madoff, except that unlike his hedge fund fraud, this one is being carried out in full public view.

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Here's one of the comments from the article which is succinct:

I was shocked in the 90's to see a Europe that we helped economically for decades, living so high while contributing so little in defense. Our spending provided a measure of safety for their cradle to grave socialism and six week vacations and a welfare system that brought a flood of muslims that do not share western values.