You know, simple words lost in the quicksand of experience.

People hate this. It's what Marianne LaFrance calls standing in social quicksand.

Mounting imbalances in the US were the mirror image of those in China a massive shortfall of domestic saving, unprecedented current account deficits, excess debt, and an asset dependent economy that was ultimately built on speculative quicksand.

But it's a hard hurdle because we got into this legal quicksand because we woke up in the 1960s to all these really bad values racism, gender discrimination, pollution they were bad values. And we wanted to create a legal system where no one could have bad values anymore.

Yet a mechanism of this kind can only work if a third party (the US, the US plus, or the Middle East Quartet) is available to monitor the agreement. Otherwise, disputes about fulfillment of this or that provision will lead the entire process back into the familiar quicksand of Middle East futility.

In February, I presented to the Eurogroup (which convenes the finance ministers of eurozone member states) a menu of options, including GDP indexed bonds, which Charles Goodhart recently endorsed in the Financial Times, perpetual bonds to settle the legacy debt on the European Central Bank s books, and so forth. One hopes that the ground is now better prepared for such proposals to take root, before Greece sinks further into the quicksand of insolvency.