So the last question and answer in Elizabeth Warren's interview with Frontline is probably one of the great summaries of what has happened during the past year and how we got there.

We've been talking about one tsunami. We haven't talked about credit cards yet. Is there another tsunami coming? ...

In many ways, credit card debt and mortgages were the two things that were the cocaine of the financial services industry. They produced profits beyond your wildest dreams. Boy, why invest in small businesses and construction lines when you can get the profits off those? ... We've watched what happens and the collapse of housing prices, these enormously risky mortgage products that were pushed out there that were promising the high profits, but of course now are going to produce these terrific losses.

And here are the credit cards, kind of the last big profit center for these large financial institutions. And two things are happening simultaneously. They're trying to wring every last dollar they can out of them: Let's raise people's interest rates; let's tack on more fees; let's get tougher on when it is that you're overdue. Push, push, push, get as many dollars as you can, because we're hemorrhaging money over here on the mortgages and everywhere else. ...

Wages have been flat at that point for about a decade. Nobody's making any more money. ... Core expenses -- housing, health insurance, transportation, child care -- have been rising. Families are saving nothing. They're carrying mounting loads of debt in order to bridge the gap between their rising expenses and their flat incomes. They're tapped out. And that's where we are while the boom is still on, while unemployment is low, interest rates are low. The party goes on.

[Then] the housing market declined sharply, which means ordinary Americans, their net worth on paper just is going through the floor, because for most people, there are only two assets that they've got: They've got a house and maybe, if they're lucky, a 401(k). Both of those are going down sharply. Unemployment is going up. Core expenses are not coming down. So the American consumer, the family, the ordinary middle-class folks, they're on their knees financially.

How do we get out of this? They've been the ox that pulled the plow. They've been the consumer. You could count on them. It was safe to invest in retail. It was safe to invest in restaurants. It was safe to invest in anything they might use because they'll always get up and spend and drive this economy.

The fundamentals during the boom showed that that whole underlying economic picture was wrong. It was wrong. It was created through smoke and mirrors, through crazy monetary policy, through permitting financial institutions to keep marketing these credit products and promising profits and throwing them out into this larger marketplace, and these complex instruments and doing trades and bets off them, and pretending that that was wealth, that that was reality.

Well, the party's over. The financial institutions are down for the count. But look around the room. Basic economics of the American family have changed, and that means there's a fundamental reordering here. We can't just jump-start this. We can't just say, "You know, we'll bite our lips, and in another six months we're going to get that same old economy back." ...

We're going to make a series of decisions over the next six months to a year that are going to shape who we are as a people, who we are as a country for the next 50 years. This is our moment. We'll decide this. And what we decide will set who we become. I believe that.