Then the shit hit the fan. - John Kenneth Galbraith

With the American failure came world failure.

But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with communism, lies the threat to capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound.

All crisis have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.