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And the U.S. economy, indeed global economies, came extremely close to a catastrophic meltdown into a second Great Depression in 2008.
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The government's creation of a mechanism to take on bad assets from banks and other financial institutions has stopped a catastrophic meltdown of the system.
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There would have to be a catastrophic meltdown, combined with a terrible explosion, combined with howling winds going in exactly the wrong direction to even have a chance of coming close.
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But if it worsens and you have a full core meltdown, that would certainly be catastrophic.
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This kind of overconfidence can lead to disasters, such as with the Chernobyl disaster (the Ukrainian Minister of Power stated the odds of a meltdown were 1 in 10, 000 just two months before the meltdown), the Challenger (NASA estimated the odds of catastrophic failure as 1 in 100, 000), or Pearl Harbor (the American military believed that Pearl Harbor was virtually immune to attack).
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