Historian sees complex debt schemes key in many U.S. downturns

Since the financial market collapse of 2008, hardly a news cycle has churned without reference to the Great Recession being the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression. For some, those two bad-debt calamities loom as the dark anomalies in the brighter story of America's long ascent to economic superpower. Not so, says Scott Reynolds Nelson, a history professor at the College of William and Mary....