I knew it!

I've been trying to put this into a coherent post for months now, but this guy came along and explained it much better than I can. That the whole housing bubble and subprime meltdown is just a small symptom of a much larger problem, i.e. the US economy is based not on creation of value added wealth, but on the creation of debt.

Phillips argues in the book that the U.S. economy is in danger because of its reliance on the financial industry. He also believes that Wall Street has steered the nation toward greater debt.

It's not all doom and gloom though. In the NPR interview he talks about how the British and Dutch have, after a period of discomfort, transformed themselves from economies of imperial finance back into small nation-states thriving in the shadow of a new Leviathan.