There’s a thought provoking article in the new Vanity Fair by Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winning economist, which evaluates what the current financial situation 
throughout the world means to America’s position in it.
It is worth reading and thinking about, since it lays most of the responsibility on a “free-market economy” as foisted on the world by a greedy and thoughtless Wall Street, which set very different standards for other countries than it adopted for the U.S. This from the article:
Among critics of American-style capitalism in the Third World, the way that America has responded to the current economic crisis has been the last straw. During the East Asia crisis, just a decade ago, America and the I.M.F. demanded that the affected countries cut their deficits by cutting back expenditures–even if, as in Thailand, this contributed to a resurgence of the aids epidemic, or even if, as in Indonesia, this meant curtailing food subsidies for the starving. America and the I.M.F. forced countries to raise interest rates, in some cases to more than 50 percent. They lectured Indonesia about being tough on its banks–and demanded that the government not bail them out. What a terrible precedent this would set, they said, and what a terrible intervention in the Swiss-clock mechanisms of the free market.
The contrast between the handling of the East Asia crisis and the American crisis is stark and has not gone unnoticed. To pull America out of the hole, we are now witnessing massive increases in spending and massive deficits, even as interest rates have been brought down to zero. Banks are being bailed out right and left. Some of the same officials in Washington who dealt with the East Asia crisis are now managing the response to the American crisis. Why, people in the Third World ask, is the United States administering different medicine to itself?
So, as our influence in the world diminishes and that of countries like China increases, we are watching a situation where Wall Street has actually been brought in to handle what’s wrong with Wall Street. Stiglitz thinks that Americans “will realize that what is required for success is a regime where the roles of market and government are in balance, and where a strong state administers effective regulations. They will realize that the power of special interests must be curbed.”
If we do realize this, will we do so too ate in the game to make the kind of recovery which protects our lifestyle and influence? If you realize that of the top 5 banks in the world, the first 4 are Chinese and America has number 5 where it used to be number 1, then you now our position in the “free-market” economy is shaky at best.
And he goes further:
There used to be a sense of shared values between America and the American-educated elites around the world. The economic crisis has now undermined the credibility of those elites. We have given critics who opposed America’s licentious form of capitalism ample ammunition to preach a broader anti-market philosophy. And we keep giving them more and more ammunition. While we committed ourselves at a recent G-20 meeting not to engage in protectionism, we put a “buy American” provision into our own stimulus package. And then, to soften the opposition from our European allies, we modified that provision, in effect discriminating against only poor countries.
Are we weakening the sense of “global trust” necessary for “global recovery?” Stiglitz thinks so, and I have to agree with him.
Read the article and see what you think.
There is one thing we can always count on when marketing and capitalism combine: human greed and selfishness. It’s built into the system. Without strong honest governmental oversight we will repeat the cycles ad nauseum. And maybe the scavengers count on it.
It’s more than that: capitalism creates an environment that selects for — in the evolutionary sense — greed and corruption. It’s an unavoidable consequence, and failure to recognize this basic fact is the chief blind spot of laissez faire capitalism.
I say blind spot because, while not all advocates of unregulated markets are sincere in their advocacy — the rich ones aren’t, the ones who want to be rich generally are — because wealth is a competitive advantage, the end result of an unregulated market is a small group of monopolies, thereby bringing an end to competition. Unregulated capitalism is self-defeating.
A society that understands this uses well-regulated capitalism as a tool; a society that does not understand this is eventually destroyed by it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlXUFlQIUBA
Peak Oil.
Without expanding cheap energy, infinite economic growth is over. This means–except for special cases such as the foreclosure industry, or the canabalized spare parts industry–that return on investment is over.
And that means the end of Capitalism.
Ponzi schemes, on the other hand, will continue, as will perpetual motion energy-from-nothing “investment opportunities”.
We are now in the eating-the-seed-corn phase of civilization.