Credit Crunch: The world's new soggy cereal

OK - I have some catching up to do. Like many of my self-initiated assignments, this blog started off with a momentous roar and then retreated with a whimper. Maybe it's that while I try to adjust to a new school and new city, the world is encountering new challenges each day that a word written about it in one minute is outdated the next.

We now know that the financial crisis is cascading to Europe, like a massive fan "wave" at a college football game. This really is the test of our time, perhaps more devastating than 9/11 in both its real economic and psychological impacts -- and the numbers are starting to come out as to what the impact on households will look like. It took America a couple of years to recover from 9/11, and it will likely take a lot longer when all the dust settles and the Congress settles on permanent legislation to regulate the evolving financial sector.

In one hour, the American presidential candidates will spar for the second of three times before Nov. 4, and for the first time since Gov. Sarah Palin accused Sen. Barack Obama of "palling with terrorists." It's an outrageous but certainly answerable claim, considering her source was The New York Times, which, undoubtedly to the dismay of the Obama campaign, Gov. Palin (or her speechwriters) most likely was reading for the first time when the article appeared.

Those are my "brain droppings" (RIP George Carlin) for now. Check back for a couple write-ups soon on recent lectures I attended here at the LSE. This truly is an amazing place; 160 countries represented, and lectures and professors that cover almost everything under the sun.