When Dorothy set out to find her way back to Kansas from Oz, everyone she asked along the way told her, simply, "Follow the yellow brick road. These well-marked bricks will take you to the wizard, and the wizard has the power to get you back home."

Each of us has bricks that we can examine that, when pooled with those of everyone else, will enlarge our understanding of how we arrived where we are in 2002. All that is required is a cursory understanding about how money works in our capitalist system.

This article is intended as an example of how that can be done. Much of the understanding is simply adjusting our perception of what sometimes appears to be complicated, unrelated events in the financial world, keeping in mind some very basic premises. If I put cash into a corporation, it can be in two forms. I can get stock (equity) in that corporation, or I can get the right to be paid back in full at a later date (debt). These are very simplistic financial models available, though there are variations that occur that tend to make the options seem much more complex.