America faces day of reckoning with debt

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

For now, the consensus view is that sub-prime losses will total $500bn and crimp lending by $2 trillion as bank multiples kick into reverse.

This assumes there are no more shoes to drop. Yet shoes are dangling precariously across the global credit system. We may soon have to add the terms HELOCs and "monoline insurers" to our crunch lexicon.