A Power That May Not Stay So Super
At the heart of the troubles, both short term and long term, is debt.
Debt helped create the housing bubble and has now left almost one of every six homeowners with a mortgage larger than the value of their home.
Debt built up, and then laid low, modern Wall Street, where firms borrowed $30 for every $1 they owned. And in the coming years, debt will constrain the United States government, as it copes with the combined deficits created by the Bush administration’s policies, the ever-more expensive financial rescue and the biggest item of all, Medicare for the baby boomers.

In essence, households, banks and the government have already spent some of their future earnings. The current crisis marks the point at which the bills begin to get paid. Whereas Britain lumbered under the weight of imperial overreach, as the historian Niall Ferguson has written, the United States will be shackled primarily by its financial overreach.