For those enamoured by free markets and deregulation, the US experience makes for sobering reflection – although some argue that the Military-Industrial-Media Complex is hardly a model of free market economics.
For some time now, market fundamentalists had preached that the government should have as little do as as possible in regulating business. Now, we see Wall Street being brought to its knees and turning to the US government to bail out failed financial institutions, the victims of their own unbridled greed. All this is the result of financial deregulation with little oversight.
This is also what happens when the Occupation of Iraq meets financial deregulation, a wild credit bubble (cheap credit) and a colossal debt:
A shattering moment in America’s fall from power
The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is overJohn Gray
The Observer,
Sunday September 28 2008Our gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over.
