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The thought for a long time was that banks needed to be too controlled, too regulated to be turned over to the Wild West of the Net. Then the credit meltdown hit, and we saw just how reckless these so-called safe and regulated institutions were.

Of course most Americans don't know how A.I.G. brought the world's financial system to near-ruin or what credit-default swaps are. They may not even know what A.I.G. stands for. But Americans do make the connection between their fears about their own jobs and their broad understanding of the A.I.G. debacle.

The Greek debt issue, for example, is such a threat because if that country ever defaulted, it might cause some bank that's 'too big to fail' to actually fail.

There was a real fear that a euro-zone bank might fail, that we'd have a sovereign debt problem in one of the larger European economies. That's dissipated, thanks largely to the action of the European Central Bank.

To the extent that bank panics interfere with normal flows of credit, they may affect the performance of the real economy.

The banking collapse was caused, more than anything, by bad government policy and the total failure of bad regulation, rather than by greed.

The failure of one regional bank, assuming it is following a traditional model, will not threaten the entire system.

The World Bank is now the biggest culprit in the debt crisis.

It is probably the case that some regulation of financing will make crises less likely, and I would say higher capital requirements are an almost fail-safe way to make banks safer. But there are a lot of other things that may not be doing that, and so we need to be careful about sort of, like, rushing to one conclusion or another.

The job of the Central Bank is to worry.