Today at the Brookings Institute Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke spoke about the past year's economic collapse. He spoke about the events in the United States and of the similar experiences across the world. In his statements he discussed the steps that regulators and the Federal Reserve took to slow the rate of decline and mitigate the effects of the downturn. However, he stressed the importance of the global response.

While diplomats do not save praise for the G20 summit, economists are complaining. Journalists and reporters lamented over the fruitless discussion on the November 15th meeting of presidents and prime ministers in Washington, too. Interestingly, BBC, the New York Times, and the International Herald Tribune labeled the outcomes of the G20 summit as "a plain-vanilla stuff ," a term coined by Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

This month's near-breakdown of the global financial system is a classic example of a pattern that has occurred periodically since the eighteenth century, though not at this magnitude since the Great Depression - an unsustainable investment bubble followed by inevitable collapse and panicky selling of depreciating assets. The results are massive debt, banks (those which have survived) reluctant to lend, job availability plummeting, and 401K retirement plan balances shrinking.