Then it all came crashing down.

So, what threatens to happen with this unfolding apocalypse is the collapse of global social organization.

But it probably will have little to do with a bond market crash.

Is Europe today prepared to deal with a similar failure of an important financial institution?

The analogy to the Internet, the new economy, and the crash of the NASDAQ is straightforward.

The distress following the failure of Lehman Brothers would have been an obvious occasion.

The proximate reason for all financial crises is excessive credit growth a credit boom that goes bust.

The peace process was collapsing throughout my teenage years.

Then came a backlash, fuelled in large part by the Enron debacle and other corporate scandals. Much of the world began to turn away from the American way of doing business.

Then came a backlash, fuelled in large part by the Enron debacle and other corporate scandals.

They are used to dealing with governments now they must learn to deal with the collapse of the private sector.

The 1960's ended in the breakdown of the system, and in major financial turbulence, accompanied by an inflationary surge of commodity prices. Everyone was hurt, and America's role in world affairs was shaken.

STOCKHOLM With the United States crippled by Wall Street s collapse, this should be Europe s moment.

The failure of such a bank could be managed in a more orderly fashion by using a cross border resolution authority.

The 1960's ended in the breakdown of the system, and in major financial turbulence, accompanied by an inflationary surge of commodity prices.

A similar degree of complacency was evident in the United States before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008.

By late spring, those expectations had disintegrated alongside the collapse of Enron, WorldCom, and Arthur Andersen.

For example, long before the financial collapse, experimental economists joined psychologists in attempting to measure varying propensities to greediness.

In the years before the financial crash, capital moved from poor countries to rich countries, rather than vice versa.

How do today s problems compare with the 1929 financial crash and the depression that followed it?

Financial bubbles, like the one that has just definitively burst, are intimately related to the world of art.

Recall how a few years ago, just before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the financial sector prided itself on its innovativeness.

In the north, Tuaregs traveling to Mauritania, Algeria and Niger, were particularly weakened by persistent drought and the collapse of the caravan economy.

The stock exchange boom of the early 1870 s was followed by collapse in 1873 and a witch hunt for those responsible.

It is also comparable to the demand driven collapse in 2008 2009, following the global financial crisis.

Ukraine does not collapse, but the oligarchs reassert themselves and the new Ukraine begins to resemble the old Ukraine.

Despite decades of effort, the process of trial and error through bilateral and conflict management approaches has always ended in frustration.

With communism s collapse and Russia temporarily disabled, self deterrence softened, and the US ran off the rails as the global hyperpower.

Perhaps the Bush administration worries that if oil countries abandoned the dollar standard, today s dollar weakness would turn into a rout. But the US should be far more worried about promoting faster adjustment of its still gaping trade deficit, which in many ways lies at the root of the recent sub prime mortgage crisis.

Perhaps the Bush administration worries that if oil countries abandoned the dollar standard, today s dollar weakness would turn into a rout.

Others did so because the banks, shocked by the collapse of the securitization business, stopped giving them home equity loans for consumption purposes.

The state of economic knowledge was just as bad in the Great Depression that followed the 1929 stock market crash.

But, until now, it has been the only approach proven to succeed, while everything else has failed.

This belief quickly shaped reality, as market analysts blurred the distinction between a growth slowdown and economic collapse.

Refusing international help in such instances would mean electoral suicide for any government that faces a major bank collapse.

His creed became the ethos of a decade of corporate and financial sector excesses that ended in the late 1980 s collapse of the junk bond market and the Savings Loan crisis.

If Merkel s government believes that paying lip service to growth is enough, it is playing with fire a euro collapse in which not only Germans would be badly burned.

His creed became the ethos of a decade of corporate and financial sector excesses that ended in the late 1980 s collapse of the junk bond market and the Savings amp

We have distorted that history by thinking of bubbles as a period of dramatic price growth, followed by a sudden turning point and a major and definitive crash.

In even the best performing economies, such as Germany, growth since the 2008 crisis has been so slow that, in any other circumstance, it would be rated as dismal.

With the crisis of the 1990's brought on by the collapse of our Soviet patron, many Cubans returned to what Che said about economics, and admit the value of what is achieved with effort.

If you agree with the many pundits who say stock prices have gone too high, and are much more likely to fall than to rise further, you may be right but not if macroeconomic risk continues to drain from the system.

At the end of 2000, at the height of the Internet stock boom and just before the 2001 crash, the economists James Glassman and Kevin Hassett published Dow 36,000 .

Just before the October 19, 1987, stock market crash, the biggest one day drop in history, the image on people s minds was the crash of 1929.

But the scale of her triumph is mainly due to the collapse of her liberal coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party (FDP), which for the first time in the German Federal Republic s history will not be represented in the Bundestag.