Last month a meeting of would-be donors to discuss ways of giving the Congolese a "peace dividend" was plunged into darkness by a power cut, despite being held in Kinshasa's plushest hotel.
Right now we're in a liquidity trap, which, as I explained in an earlier post, means that we have an incipient excess supply of savings even at a zero interest rate.
The morning mist was gathering slowly in the valley, and that mist was you, getting more and more thick, more and more into the fancy, the romance, the idiocy of one's own life.
In this case, AIG managed to take a business specifically designed to be low risk, low return and amp it into another dicey venture - with taxpayers on the hook.