As I make these notes, the U.S. Congress is trying to cobble a deal together that, by all accounts, will save the world from financial Armageddon by relieving financial institutions of bad mortgage loans. I hope that predictions of what might happen are overstated. At the same time, I really, really want these people to work something out.

What's hard, I think, is buying into the idea that things are so bad.  We don't see it, really. We still go to Costco, argue whether Nike or Addidas makes better shoes, wonder what our homes are worth, hope for lower interest rates, think about what to buy everyone for Christmas (or other winter holiday) etc.  If catastrophe is at hand, it sure doesn't feel like it.

It's hard for most people to get their arms around an abstraction. It was hard to get many people to take the issue of construction defects seriously, because folks really couldn't see ithem without peeking inside the building envelope.  But a looming financial catastrophe? OK, things may not be great, but it doesn't look like catastrophe out there.

It wasn't that long ago--the 1990's--when interstate banking was against the law. You could not withdraw cash from ATMs. It was really, really hard to get vendors in California to take a check written on an Oregon bank.

And it wasn't much earlier than those times--the 1980s--that you couldn't get a mortgage loan just for the asking. There were times when savings and loans and banks just weren't making them.  FHA and VA was all there was if you had less than a 20% down payment.

And it wasn't much before that--1970, to be exact--that you could take a five-dollar bill, a ten-dollar bill and a twenty-dollar bill and get an ounce of gold for it.

Maybe the speed of how things changed adds to the difficulty of understanding where we are.  From the simplicity of gold to the complexity of a credit default swap in just over thirty years is a lot for people to take in.