A simple way to win Economic Debate

This is for any party. Can anyone, in any party, explain to us what is the financial meltdown about? I mean, we talk about crisis, and we have as many opions about it as there are economists. Paulson and Bernanke seem to be very vague or too technical. So please, in plain English what is the problem?

Here is my take. Everybody needs loans to buy stuff. You get a loan from a bank. For a bank to loan you money it has to have the money in the first place, and where does it get it from? Financial markets. Now, this is a problem - banks do not lend to each other and thus they cannot lend us, and thus the economy stalls, and thus we have a crisis.

Another useful comment. We do not need to help the banks because they are buncrupt but because they do not trust each other, and thus they will push each other into buncrupcy. And the urgency is that it is easier to rescue a critically wounded patient than to bring someone from the dead. Even though the difference is small in terms of state of things (critically woulded patient is seconds away from being dead), the difference in terms of posibility of recovery is huge.