Do I need to remind you that it was all the "reputable economists" in the world, all the cheerleaders for rampant greed and unregulated markets that helped MAKE this mess? None of them, no one that wasn't screaming from the rooftops about the disaster that we've seen coming for years, should be listened to for a moment. The have and deserve no credibility at all.

If few people are buying, either because they simply don't have it due to layoffs, illness or any of a number of imaginable catastrophes, or they are afraid they soon won't have a cushion and so save what they can, if the customers aren't there, if consumer demand continues to fall, what possible reason would a business have to borrow, or a bank to lend even if they could? It's called debt deflation and there are indications that we have already entered that self-reinforcing cycle.

And let's not forget, the GOP hasn't WON a presidential election in 16 years. If they steal this one, we should go to the nearest GOP headquarters and.....\ After letting everyone get out the back door, of course.

I say that as someone who is a trained biologist and who has studied economics for 15 years.

Leonard misses the point. Greenspin said it himself. For 30 years, massive deregulation seemed to work. Of course, for that to make sense, you have to overlook the Asian crash, and the Mexican bailout, the S+L crash, the dot com bubble, and the energy market meltdown of the early 21st century. As long as the Wall Street whack jobs were raking it in hand over fist, the "peer review", Internet and otherwise, supported massive deregulation, regardless of the instabilities being built into the system.

It took a crisis too huge for them to paper over, a crisis so large that their ability to profit was hampered, for them to reconsider. Unlike the physical sciences, there was and is no recourse to objective reality in economics. Facts inconsistent with the lazy fairy concept of markets were simply ignored as long as the right people were profiting.

"I will never apologize for changing a strategy or an approach if the facts change."

What changed? Not a blessed thing. Except Mr. Paulson's understanding that giving the taxpayers ABSOLUTELY nothing (except toxic trash) in exchange for our billions simply wouldn't fly in Congress. So he did the next best thing. We get nonvoting stock that pays substandard dividends and with no premium for buy back. And no committment to reign in CEO salaries and bonuses...... I think Mr. Leonard gives Secretary Goldman-Sachs far too much benefit of the doubt.

His life in finance has made him oblivious to the needs of Main Street and the real economy. He simply cannot see that there needs to be a solution independent of Wall Street. We need jobs we can live on, and the credit mess will take care of itself.

If the middle class has the means to buy again- based on real income not mining equity in a real estate bubble-- we will buy cars, banks will have reason to lend and businesses to borrow again.

But Paulson, with his focus on finance, can't see that the source of this crisis, and the foundation of its solution, lies in the real economy, not on Wall Street.

The foundation is in the real economy. The source was an imbalance in the real economy, between productivity increases and stagnant wages. Stagnant wages and booming productivity, along with the Reagan tax policies that favored the wealthy, created a huge pool of capital desperately looking for productive investments. This motivated all the unstable financial innovations that we are now paying so dearly for. (It also created conditions in which people HAD to mine the equity in their homes.)

And interestingly enough, this was exactly the process that took place in the 1920s. And we know how THAT one ended up.

Today, everything has changed, except our ways of thinking, and hence we hurdle headlong towards catastrophe.

"at the moment, investment in new oil production capacity is getting hammered by the double whammy of low oil prices (which makes existing facilities offshore and in, for example, the Alberta oil sands, uneconomic) and the unforgiving credit environment, which is making it very hard to get the financing necessary to undertake new projects."

Uh, how much profit did EXXON, and BP and Mobil-Shell make last quarter? Do you really expect me to believe that oil exploration depends on access to credit? Wildcatters and small operators were important in the past. They are not involved in offshore exploration, or in most of the world's as yet undeveloped and unidentified fields. The industry has enough resources to develop new fields without borrowing a penny or selling a single bond. Whether they are willing to take money out of their sweet dividend checks to operate the biz or not, credit isn't REQUIRED. not by a long shot.