It's got to be upside, and it's got to be believable.

And then, because I'm looking for the upside here, I've got to have believable upside.

The only rule of perspective that I think matters is if it looks believable, you've succeeded.

Telling me you're going to be out there making a billion dollars a year that's not believable.

And the great thing about it was that Alex was so dedicated to the idea of verisimilitude, the idea that the putative 2054 that we were painting in the film be believable, that he allowed us to take on that design work as if it were an R D effort.

They only made it easier for people, in those areas of the world where there is a half believable story about a fabulous future economy, to indulge their fantasies. Interest rate increases will deliver a fresh dose of reality the interest expense of owning a home is going to claim a larger share of family budgets, a hard fact that will eventually sink into our thinking.

Similarly, we have to hope that some of the same old stories that propelled us in the past the rise of capitalism and its internationalization throughout the world economy can somehow be dusted off and revived yet again to invigorate the animal spirits that drive economic recovery. Our efforts to stimulate the economy should be focused on improving the script for those stories, making these stories believable again.

Yet the risk premia on non Treasury assets have soared to barely believable heights the annual interest rate premium for holding a CD issued by a private bank now stands at five percentage points. And it is this rise in risk premia that threatens to send the global economy into a deep recession, and turn the financial markets from a spectacle of schadenfreude into a malign source of unemployment and idle factories worldwide.