Rough Week, But America's Era Goes On
By Niall Ferguson
Washington Post
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Does Wall Street's meltdown presage the end of the American century? Many commentators have warned that the past week's financial mayhem signaled a major political setback for the United States as well as an economic one. "Why should the rest of the world ever again take seriously the American free-market model after this debacle?" a leading British journalist asked me last Thursday. This crisis, he argued, was to economics what the Iraq war was to U.S. foreign policy: a fatal blow to the credibility of American claims to global primacy.
Certainly, if the talk of a "unipolar moment" after the collapse of the Soviet empire was hubris, then the credit crunch has been a very American nemesis. Ten years ago, there was a strange competition in the United States to see who could be more arrogant. Neoconservatives argued that the rest of the world should hurry up and embrace the American political way or prepare to be bombed into the democratic age. But equally smug were the neoliberal economists, who argued that the rest of the world should hurry up and embrace the so-called Washington consensus of expanding trade, attacking inflation and encouraging foreign investment, or prepare to be sold short. One lot derided the political failure of the Muslim world; the other lot heaped scorn on Asian "crony capitalism," supposedly the root cause of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis.
The neocons got their comeuppance in Iraq, where American forces were not, after all, ultimately embraced as liberators. The neolibs got theirs this month, as a Republican Treasury Department, headed by the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, effectively nationalized first the country's biggest mortgage lenders and then its biggest insurance company. As the presidential candidates, in rare unison, heap opprobrium on Wall Street gamblers and slumbering regulators, the stage seems set for the demise of "market fundamentalism," in George Soros's phrase.
That policy paradigms are shifting is clear. But is the global balance of power shifting too? To answer that question, we need to reflect more deeply on the true nature of this crisis.
(Continued here.)
Washington Post
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Does Wall Street's meltdown presage the end of the American century? Many commentators have warned that the past week's financial mayhem signaled a major political setback for the United States as well as an economic one. "Why should the rest of the world ever again take seriously the American free-market model after this debacle?" a leading British journalist asked me last Thursday. This crisis, he argued, was to economics what the Iraq war was to U.S. foreign policy: a fatal blow to the credibility of American claims to global primacy.
Certainly, if the talk of a "unipolar moment" after the collapse of the Soviet empire was hubris, then the credit crunch has been a very American nemesis. Ten years ago, there was a strange competition in the United States to see who could be more arrogant. Neoconservatives argued that the rest of the world should hurry up and embrace the American political way or prepare to be bombed into the democratic age. But equally smug were the neoliberal economists, who argued that the rest of the world should hurry up and embrace the so-called Washington consensus of expanding trade, attacking inflation and encouraging foreign investment, or prepare to be sold short. One lot derided the political failure of the Muslim world; the other lot heaped scorn on Asian "crony capitalism," supposedly the root cause of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis.
The neocons got their comeuppance in Iraq, where American forces were not, after all, ultimately embraced as liberators. The neolibs got theirs this month, as a Republican Treasury Department, headed by the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, effectively nationalized first the country's biggest mortgage lenders and then its biggest insurance company. As the presidential candidates, in rare unison, heap opprobrium on Wall Street gamblers and slumbering regulators, the stage seems set for the demise of "market fundamentalism," in George Soros's phrase.
That policy paradigms are shifting is clear. But is the global balance of power shifting too? To answer that question, we need to reflect more deeply on the true nature of this crisis.
(Continued here.)
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