Reading the news these days has all of us feeling a bit whipsawed. Just when it looks like some positive news is floating our way, another wave of bad news breaks over our heads.

The latest waves have been coming from Ireland, as the €85 billion ($111 billion) bailout package was approved recently while most of us were home, catching our breath.

Meanwhile, Icelandic and Portuguese finance ministers continue to claim that the states of their respective state’s finances, while admittedly troubled, are not in any immediate danger of heading into default. Of course, that’s what finance ministers always claim, shortly before the fall.

Skimming the headlines coming from across the pond here in the United States, you’d think that everything here finally is starting to settle out. It isn’t.

The fact is, the Western economies on both sides of the Atlantic were terribly overleveraged heading into the most recent financial crisis, and the fairly uniform re