Money Troubles in America: Is there anything left that we can claim to be good at?

The NYT has a fascinating and thoughtful Op-Ed piece about the financial crisis. The main thing I take away from it is that the cliche of thinking about the big picture has been absent from our financial system for so long that now we're in such a mess that the first steps toward a solution all fall into the category of "stop doing really stupid stuff."

Thus far I have not been directly effected by the financial crisis, and I actually spent several hundred dollars in the last week to build myself a new computer. For an impoverished grad student with no prospect of ever making a lot of money, my financial situation is actually fairly secure, but that doesn't mean that I'm not still frightened of what might happen if Obama is not able to fix what is clearly a deeply dysfunctional financial system.