Progressive Opinion

ft.com — The wreckage of the financial system holds up a mirror to the changing geopolitical balance. It offers advice, and a warning, as to what the west should make of the emerging global order.

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progressive.org — So there is justice in the world. The biggest bubble blown in the recent past — Alan Greenspan’s reputation — has finally been pricked. Greenspan’s judgment was long thought to be infallible. Along with the markets, however, his standing has crumbled, too.

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prospect.org — Can a massive government intervention in the economy work if it is being run by people who don't believe in government?

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thenation.com — More than a decade ago, a woman you've likely never heard of was the oracle whose warnings just might have averted the calamitous bust now engulfing the U.S. and global markets. Instead she was met with scorn, condescension and outright anger by former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and his deputy Lawrence Summers.

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ndnblog.org — As fear trumps reason and emotion rules, people in panics lose their ability to act rationally and instead move with the herd. However, the branch of economics known as game theory suggests that people acting entirely rationally can still cause a disaster. And this, more than just irrational panic, is the problem we face today.

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truthdig.com — Is the United States destined to look and feel increasingly like a “developing country”? Is this the way it’s going to be? I want to know if this is some kind of final reckoning for the way we’ve been living so far beyond our means. Is the bartender finally presenting us the bill for our tab?

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nytimes.com — If the nation plunges into a deeper recession, the deficit will be even larger as a proportion of the economy. Yet all is not what it seems.

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time-blog.com — Did anybody else notice that when Hank Paulson was describing in his press conference what the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act enables Treasury to do, the first thing he listed was "to inject capital into financial institutions"?

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boston.com — Now come the second thoughts on globalization. Never before have world markets been so integrated. And yesterday's concerted interest rate cuts by central banks in the United States and other countries from Britain to China was a signal that the financial crisis rippling around the globe has grown too big for any one of them — even the US Federal Reserve — to contain on its own.

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guardian.co.uk — After a generation during which any suggestion of interference in the magic garden of City finance has been treated as destructive heresy, the rescue plan is a telling demonstration of the vast potential of public action — as well as that, in the words of the celebrated former British industrialist Arnold Weinstock, "there is no such thing as a free market."

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