Editor's Letter: Five Years From the Brink

Back when it began, when television control rooms were scrambling for something to slap on the bottom of the screen and headline writers were crunching words to fit, “financial crisis” became the catchall term for the biggest economic story of the past half-century. You’d expect a better name to have emerged by now. It took remarkable ingenuity to unleash the forces that paralyzed markets, overturned governments, and ruined countless lives, not to mention causing an historic decline in global gross domestic product. For creativity to fail in the summing up is just one more insult.