Governments can't make bad debt go away, so they can't prevent a correction and a de-leveraging.

When the government borrows money to fund its bailouts and boondoggles, for example, it is taking losses away from the people who deserve them and sticking them on the taxpayer.

The only two things going up?

When interest rates were falling from 15% to 3% it was hard to go broke. Almost no matter how much debt you had, you could refinance at lower rates. Which gave the rest of the world the wrong idea. It seemed like you could borrow forever.

Stabilize public debts by 2016? By then, the US and other major economies will have more government debt than GDP. It is bound to be too late for many of them.

The G20 meeting in Toronto was billed as a showdown between the Germans and the Americans -- between the deficit cutters and the big spenders.

Even Tim Geithner must realize that all those trillions spent on "stimulus" were largely wasted.

You've heard the expression, "bad money after good"? Well, stimulus money was bad money from the beginning.

Economists were surprised, say the reports. The feds are still paying buyers $8,000 to buy a house. And still the number of buyers is going down.

A Great Correction is what you get when a great many things need to be corrected at the same time.