That said, I don't think much more will be accomplished than at the last G20 meeting. As far as I can tell, they aren't doing any of the ground work in the weeks before that would make a co-ordinated policy even possible.

G20 Happy Talk Doesn’t Hide Tears.

Yeah, but YOU should go hide YOUR wallet.

While the crisis is months old and one might think the leaders of the world's most powerful economies would have come closer to figuring out how to respond by now, that fact of the matter is that there's no consensus within most of these countries, let alone among them.

I see this as a much longer term cycle, than months. I read Shiller's Irrational Exuberance in the midst of the dot-com bubble. This crisis is not so disconnected. We basically had two bubbles back to back, growing out of easy money and over confidence. Those were the parties, this is the hangover.

I picked up Shiller and Akerlof's Animal Spirits yesterday. It is shaping up as a good read, and of course a counterpoint to the earlier Exuberance. In the intro they remind us that GW Bush offered that explanation for all this ("Wall Street got drunk").

At this point I haven't read far enough to really recommend the second book, but I can very much recommend the first one. You can't understand the hangover without understanding the party.

As I've said here before, manias and panics are two sides of the same coin.