Obama’s election last Tuesday marks an enormous opportunity for the United States to redefine itself, both with respect to its economic and social model, and in how it relates to the outside world.
reformulate what America stands for in the realm of ideas, as Franklin Roosevelt did after 1932 or Ronald Reagan after 1980.
most notably the Asian economic crisis of 1997-98 and the Swedish banking collapse of the early 1990s, but these warning signs were not heeded and no one imagined that this could happen to the United States itself. In this the Democrats were fully complicit, not just in their support for loan expansion by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but in Clinton Treasury Secretaries who pushed financial market liberalization on the developing world. The current crisis of course has many other causes, such as the more than $5 trillion of excess savings pouring into the country from China and other Asian countries after 2002, but the idea that history was on the side of ever-expanding deregulation was ultimately an important cause of the collapse.
