http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_19/b4227060634112.htm

"To prevent the breakdown of industrial and commercial progress, hundreds of creative reformers concluded that the world needed a shared set of facts.

The result was the invention of the first massive "public memory systems" to record and classify-in rule-bound, certified, and publicly accessible. Knowing who owned and owed, and fixing that information in public records, made it possible for investors to infer value, take risks, and track results. The final product was a revolutionary form of knowledge: "economic facts."

Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these facts.

The results are hardly surprising. In the U.S., trust has broken down between banks and subprime mortgage holders; between foreclosing agents and courts; between banks and their investors-even between banks and other banks."