America's Financial Situation via Surfing

I don't "surf" much anymore. I read the stuff in my aggregator, and when I need to answer a particular question, I use the little search bar in Firefox to ping Google, Google Images, IMDB, or Wikipedia.

That's about all I do with the web, these days.

Occassionally... very occasionally, I'll see something interesting "advertised" on one of the sites I get to through the above means.  Today, it was that "Fungus Cannon" article, which pointed me to the most brilliant explanation of American financial crisis I've ever read. It is a very long article (I had to read it over the course of several spats), but it's great: detailed but explains everything in very clear terms.

And while I generally loathe long conversations in comments, I happened to catch a phrase about three comments down that really summed everything up for me:

I’m continually amazed at how much imaginary money exists in our economy.