While everyone awaits the nest big robust recovery, perhaps it would be a good time to start demanding the educational system start educating people at the high school level about the pits and perils of not understanding the usurious instruments that they currently consider to be credit cards and payday loans, and such things as how to do compound interest on a calculator or spreadsheet.
But the fundamental problem is a moral failure, both on the part of those who borrow and those who lend. If we had a moral media they could probably find some stories in all of this, but it can’t compete with blood and guts and peeping toms.
Anyway, the credit bubble engendered by the housing bubble, which made a lot of people kings for a day, could have been avoided with proper training. Without getting into the prosperity preacher canard, even the Bible gives good instructions to both lenders and borrowers, so give it a look, oh ye of little faith.
What newer readers will discover in this post is something from both schools of economics, since I tend to think that people edumacated in one school or the other only get it right some of the time, and that it is important to sample them both on every issue if you are not trained into one delusion or the other. YMMV, which it should.
Update: I usually start out listening to the doctor.
Terraformed 