For the past two weeks, one story has dominated global news -- the state of the United States economy.

This "once in a century" economic volcano is a story filled with high-stakes drama, tension and financial fear. Millions of Americans are losing their houses and watching as their lifetime financial savings are threatened by runs on longstanding and historic banks and financial institutions.

For a generation of boomers, it is like something we have never seen before. But for our parents and past generations, a financial crisis that many are comparing to what was the beginning of the Great Depression is a lesson learned many years ago. For everyone it is a scary prospect indeed.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke -- ironically the first a Wall Street wheeler dealer and the latter an academic expert on the Great Depression -- huddled with U.S. President George Bush in the dying days of his administration to put together an emergency plan to save the economy. The price tag is a whopping $700 billion.

It is a deal, as The Spectator pointed out in an excellent analysis piece by The Economist yesterday, that no one really likes. In a capitalist dog-eat-dog system like America, businesses that are no good are supposed to fail. Main Street taxpayers do not bail out Wall Street millionaires. Banks and financial businesses that have been around for more than 100 years are not supposed to fail.

And then there's the size of the bill.

Not many countries could simply write a cheque for $700 billion. To put that number in perspective that accounts for about 6 per cent of the U.S.A.'s total GDP and -- as Mark McNeil pointed out in an editorial in this paper this week calling on the government to support the bailout -- it's $500 billion more than the entire debt of Canada.

But before anyone would write a cheque that big, you might expect that they would have a few questions, such as: What are we buying? How much of the money will we get back? Is this enough to solve the problem?

Unfortunately, no one has any of the answers for sure.

It also seems hard to believe that standout Wall Street firms such as Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns no longer exist. Neither does Washington Mutual, a 120-year-old bank that failed Thursday night and was quickly scooped up for a fraction of its actual value. And it's all happening in a highly charged political atmosphere, during one of the most controversial and historic presidential elections in decades.

I happened to be in Washington last week, and the conversations in bars and restaurants were all about the economy, the election and the state of uncertainty. The New York Times described the mood of Washington as "almost warlike" as senators, congressmen and senior officials rushed up and down Pennsylvania Avenue for one meeting after another, trying to avert a crisis.

Ironically, I was reading David Cannadine's excellent biography of Andrew Mellon. You might recall Mellon was U.S. secretary treasurer during the last great financial crisis in 1929. Then-U.S. President Herbert Hoover, sounding incredibly like John McCain, told the American public in October, 1929: "The fundamental business of the country, that is production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis."

They say journalism is history on the run, and these past two weeks are certainly proof of that.

David Estok is The Spectator's editor-in-chief. editorfeedback@thespec.com