I find that watching the unfolding of “Depression II: The Global Meltdown” is a little like watching House M.D. Teams of highly-credentialed experts offer proposed diagnoses, each of which appears plausible as long as the expert is talking. I don’t know nearly enough to evaluate whose ideas best fit the circumstances, but I watch with interest as they try them out, one by one, and nothing seems to account for the mysterious malady. Every now and then, I’m alert enough to think, “But if it were malaria, she’d be…” and anticipate a plot twist, but usually I’m quite completely out of m y depth.
On the other hand, when Lee Pickard points out that the very investment firms whose precarious health is giving the world economy an acute illness are the ones that the SEC exempted from minimally common-sense investment restrictions, I hear Hugh Laurie’s voice barking out the ingeniously improbable etiology of the dire disease. Unfortunately, they haven’t devised antibiotics to combat the effects that privileged parasitic greed inflicts on complicit hosts.