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What caused the financial crisis that is sweeping across the world? What keeps asset prices and lending depressed? What can be done to remedy matters? While it is too early to arrive at definite answers to these questions, it is certainly time to offer informed conjectures, and these will be the focus of our paper. There is some consensus on the proximate causes of the crisis: (i) the U.S. financial sector misallocated resources to real estate, financed through the issuance of exotic new financial instruments; (ii) a significant portion of these instruments found their way, directly or indirectly, into commercial and investment bank balance sheets; (iii) these investments were largely financed with short-term debt. Let us first dig deeper into the more fundamental reasons for these proximate causes. I. Misallocation of Investment This is a crisis born in some ways from previous financial crises. A wave of crises swept through the emerging markets in the late 1990’s: East Asian economies collapsed, Russia defaulted, and Argentina, Brazil, and Turkey faced severe stress. In response to these crises, emerging markets became far more circumspect about borrowing from abroad. Thei