It is impossible to find parallels for the extent of this week's banking crisis since the Great Depression. But the implosions of the weekend do not even look like the American experience of depression, in which the country was swept by wave after wave of panic that wreaked widespread havoc by hitting small institutions exposed to local market conditions. Today's crisis, by contrast, is right at the heart of the financial system, and threatens a complex pattern of credit guarantees and insurance backstops that were touted as making the financial system failsafe.
在自大蕭條(Great Depression)以來的這段時期，想找到能與本周銀行業相提并論的危機是不可能的。不過，上周末爆發的事件看上去甚至不同于美國經歷過的經濟蕭條。在那些蕭條中，一波又一波的恐慌席卷整個國家，沖擊受到本地市場環境影響的小型機構，從而造成大范圍的混亂。相反，今天的危機正處于金融體系的核心，并且威脅到由信貸擔保和保險最后擔保(Insurance Backstop)組成的復雜格局，該格局號稱可以使金融體系自動排除險情。