The coming trillion dollar debt meltdown

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The next time you are trying to impress your friends by telling them how much bad debt America’s banks are choking on (It’s $400 billion, I tell you!), you can trot out this new estimate: $1 trillion. Yes, that’s trillion with a ‘t.’ A thousand billion, if you prefer.

Bloomberg News: ‘Yes, $1 trillion is the amount of defaults and writedowns Americans will likely witness before they emerge at the far side of the bursting credit bubble, estimates Charles R. Morris in his shrewd primer, ‘The Trillion Dollar Meltdown.’ That calculation assumes an orderly unwinding, which he doesn’t expect.

More: ‘’The sad truth,’’ he writes, ‘is that subprime is just the first big boulder in an avalanche of asset writedowns that will rattle on through much of 2008.’’

Where is Carl Sagan when you really need him?

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