American National Debt Clock - A sign of the times

I was just reading a story on the the bbc website about how the US national debt clock couldn't cope with the size of the US's national debt. The electronic board had to be modified with the dollar sign ($) replaced with a (1).

The Debt Clock problem has a few similarities with the Credit Crunch problem...

1. People could see that the debt clock was reaching it's limit but they didn't do anything about it. Similarly a lot of people could see the problems leading up to the credit crunch but no one did anything about it.

2. Once the Debt clock ran out of digits the fix was a short term fix of replacing the $ with a 1.
Similarly the initial fix for problems of the credit crunch was to throw money at the problem rather than looking at the root of the problem.