“Remember the credit crunch? Of course, you do. We’d never seen anything like it, or so the highest financial authorities and their lapdogs in the news media told us — not in a cool, calm, and collected way, either, but in a breathless delivery that suggested imminent economic doom unless the government immediately undertook to ‘do something.’ Which it did, of course, on a scale never before witnessed in U.S. history. So, looking back, as people are prone to do at this time of year, we can clearly see the telltale signs of the financial disaster that struck the financial markets last autumn: the terrible credit crunch, the ‘frozen’ credit that portended a complete economic ‘meltdown’ unless the government took drastic measures to head it off.” (01/06/09)