  The credit crisis roiling the world's financial markets will likely take
years and entire careers to fully understand and analyze. A short empirical
investigation of the current trends, however, demonstrates that the losses in
certain markets, in this case the US equity markets, follow a cascade or
epidemic flow like model along the correlations of various stocks. This
phenomenon will be shown by the graphical display of stock returns across the
network as well as the dependence of stock returns on topological measures.
Finally, whether the idea of "epidemic" or a "cascade" is a metaphor or model
for this crisis will be discussed.
