麻豆约拍

There are at last signs that the US housing market might be stabilising. But the legacy of excess home owners' debt will take years to overcome. Jonny Dymond reports from Ypsilanti in Michigan.

The credit rating agencies were heavily criticised for their alleged role in the boom that led to the housing market crash, and more recently for their ratings of Eurozone governments. Professor Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst argues that there should be a publicly funded alternative.

And the lessons of history. There have been no end of attempts to learn from the Great Depression of the 1930s but our regular commentator Steve Fritzinger says there are more useful parallels from even earlier economic crises.