This week's Barron's

[Mark Jones]

Greg Nowell wrote:
>When I started grad
> skool in 1980 one of my first papers was on the debt
> crisis and how it was going to bring everything to a
> crashing halt, and probably very soon, at that.  My
> prof (W.D. Burnham) reminded me not to underestimate
> capitalism's ability to muck along in a kind of
> grinding perpetual problem mode.   

I think you have a case of foreshortened historical perspective here.
1980 is not actually that long ago. And there is plenty of cause/effect
visible: the debt problem led to Plaza, 1987 and the Nikkei taking 
the strain of global reflation, which led to the end-run and 
final blow-off of Asian untrammelled Confucian cronyism which 
led to the latest Station on Capital's Calvary...

Only alchemists believe in perpetual motion. 

Those of us for who the past two years here and elsewhere have been
predicting what even the blindest economist can now see, have some 
cause for feeling smug today.

But this is only the beginning. There is a long LONG way yet to fall.
We live in interesting times after all, as it turns out.

Mark