Alan Greenspan has gone from irrational exuberance in his description of the stock market boom of the 1990s to a once-in-a-century”credit tsunami in 2008. The subject lines of my Wall Street Journal news alerts daily look increasingly like tabloid magazine headlines -“Dow Plunges!”But as we are seeing, wait a day and the news is reversed.
 
Sometimes a wake-up call is healthy; panic never is. Anyone who experienced the media’s lack of understanding and coverage of the last recession at the beginning of this decade have a large and healthy degree of skepticism about what we see on TV and read in newspapers about the current crisis. But the reality gap is at its greatest right now. Fear and speculation are driving sound bites about how bad it might get.
 
As the lead …