“The Golden Age of American capitalism is over. …In the space of half a century it passed from gold, to silver, to paper, and is now somewhere between plastic and navel lint.”- From The New Empire of Debt

In the last half of 2008, the Empire of Debt received the margin call from Hell. Now, all of its citizens are asked to pay up as the U.S. economy stumbles down a dangerous path of financial turmoil. What exactly went wrong?

When things are good, people tend to believe the most outrageous things-that the financial sector could get rich by lending money to people who couldn't pay it back, and that a whole economy could flourish by luring consumers to spend more than they could afford. These hallucinations created an immense worldwide bubble of debt and dollars. And now-with the U.S. government inflating the biggest bubble in public debt the world has ever seen-a financial whirlpool has formed and threatened to drag the entire country down the drain.

In The New Empire of Debt, the intern