Is the recent world credit crisis the start of the 5th stage of the mayan calender?
I doubt that it is the start or ending of anything other than the start of de-leveraging down and the end of easy credit. This is just another boom-bust cycle which is possible in an arguably free market system. We now know that rather than our system always returning to some sort of equilibrium it frequently goes to an extreme and may stay there for some time before bouncing around and settling into some other extreme. In each one of these bounces wealth in some hands is destroyed and wealth in other hands is created or magnified. Some times in these cycles more is destroyed than created and other times the opposite is true. The good thing about what is happening now is that a lot of this crappy paper going around ended up in the hands of foreign countries and they will bear some of the losses as opposed to U.S. banks and financial institutions bearing the losses exclusively and suffering financial collapse in this country. The losses are spread around the world and this is probably a
