With Wall Street in a frenzy, we're looking for insights and perspectives on the Credit Crisis. Your presentation should be an original take on the crisis. It can be a primer on subprime loans, or a financial model of credit default swaps or mortgage backed securities. You can be broad or talk about a specific subject such as the automotive industry or the startup ecosystem. Or you can tell the story of an average family in the face of the crisis. You have 30 slides.

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The Credit Crisis In 30 Slides

And into the present moment:

A month ago, in the first round of this crisis, panicky rumors brought down banks. Now, with trillions of nervous dollars sloshing around the international markets, panicky rumors are bringing down countries.

And here's a final, unpleasant thought: Pakistan.

The Iceland Syndrome

And, from the tail-end of the last century:

The phone rings. "Whoopee!" you think. "The phone is ringing!" O.K., you really should calm down about this phone-ringing stuff, but you are the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, and this past year, for all its chaos and tumult, has been about the most exciting you could imagine. It's the holiday season, and you are eager to get to your family and all that, but boy, this holding the world economy by the hand is even better than advertised.

See also, this letter in response to "No Depression":

Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke do not have at their disposal the means to deal with these longer-term issues that will harm world economies. To address these issues, major nations must elect leaders prepared to deal with them, or, at the very least, stop electing people who dismiss them or delay dealing with them. If weak and ineffective leaders continue to be elected, the rest of us should join together and become politically powerful so that a worldwide calamity can perhaps be avoided.

Or should we just wait and see what happens?

The Three Marketeers

History doesn't repeat itself. But it rhymes.

Here I propose to reveal some of these hitherto unreported loans–enough, at least, to justify Congress in tearing away the screen altogether and bringing to light this whole story.

Before lifting a corner of the curtain let me insert a word about this dangerous notion that government can be safely conducted in secrecy. There is a school of politicians–in close communion with their business allies–who hold to what is sometimes called the idiot theory of government, because of certain expressions which the President himself has let fall. There is a belief that the citizens are stupid; that the less they know the better off they will be; that knowledge in their immature minds will frequently produce economic disorder, and that they will be better served if they will entrust their affairs to the strong and able men set over them by Providence and a well-oiled election machine. The theory ignores a very old truth: that if there are foolish citizens there are also selfish rulers; that the poor judgment of the masses is to be trusted hardly less than the bad ethics of their leaders, and that, in any case, those who supply the funds for governments and the blood for wars have a right to know what is being done with their money and their lives.

For a century this country (and the world) has been learning the solemn lesson that it has nothing to fear so much as the public servant who is unwilling to report to society what he is doing with its funds. In America, at least, we have been warring upon secret diplomacy, secret campaign funds, secret corporation activities, secret utility and railroad managements.

From the January 1933 issue of Harper's Magazine.

Inside the R.F.C.: An adventure in secrecy

Ross Mayfield:

E-mail overload is the leading cause of preventable productivity loss in organizations today. The fundamental problem of this otherwise great technology is largely behavioral, and new practices and technologies are arising to solve it.

Here are the top five tactics for making e-mail an efficient and effective collaboration tool:

Establish Internal E-Mail Practices
Move Group E-mail to Collaborative Workspaces
Establish Public Protocols When Possible
Reply to E-mail by Blog
Leverage Special-Purpose Social Software

From the archive, Mark Bittman:

I believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life. Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, ... I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop.

E-Mail Hell

John Steele Gordon:

Why is our system is prone to panics?

Thomas Jefferson.

A Short Banking History of the United States

Angel investor and iTulip.com founder Eric Janszen contributed to this month’s Forum, "How to Save Capitalism: Fundamental fixes for a collapsing system," and wrote "The Next Bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow’s big crash."

1. Is the Dow still inflated?
2. What can we expect from federal intervention?
3. How do we create a stable regulatory structure?
4. There have been warnings about how precarious it is for the $63 trillion credit-derivatives market to be bigger than the “world economy.” What are people talking about when they bring up this figure?
5. How much worse will it get, and has anyone been able to beat this market?
6. Who should go to jail?

Six Questions for Eric Janszen on the Economic Collapse

The question that comes to my mind whenever I catch a glimpse of aggregate consumption is always the same: How can it last?

Fear of fallowing: The specter of a no-growth world

It could be argued that dramatizing the day by magnification conveys the real import.

But it is also fundamentally misleading.

Graphs that lie

"Beware of geeks bearing formulas."

The Rise of the Machines