I hope it will fail and yes it is much much more complicated and a very very VERY long story. But i will try to make it as short as possible. It starts with the fact that markets cannot selfcorrect themselves as Alan Greenspan hoped and there was that crisis with Lehman brothers , AIG not having liquidity (the main problem) etc. Yes the US government intervened and took the money of the taxpayers to correct the market, but still the crisis should be expanded out of the US, in Europe. I am sure you can find plenty of stuff about that, i will only tell that it sounds awful for the $ as a reserve currency to be much softer than the €. So how do you expand the crisis to Europe? Well in Greece there is a candidate (Γιώργος Παπανδρέου) that is also a US citizen, people don't know that he doesn't even speak greek and that he doesn't care about the legacy of his father, only about the citizenship of his mother (that is USA) and, most importantly, european banks, especially german banks, were terribly exposed to greek debt, even though they knew they shouldn't, because it was profitable...

If there are any questions...