The Road from Ruin

We Have a World-Class Mess . . . Now What? Amid the carnage of bankruptcies, soaring unemployment, and millions of families losing their homes during the financial crisis of 2007--2009 lay the bloody corpse of a set of ideas that had underpinned the economics of the previous thirty years. A system that had been delivering unprecedented prosperity on a global scale suddenly teetered on the verge of collapse. Capitalism was seemingly exposed as a house of cards. The blame game became a new national pastime as doomsayers predicted the end of America's leadership of the world economy.We're at a crossroads, and decisions about how to reshape a discredited capitalism will profoundly affect whether the coming years will be ones of depression, stagnation, or renewed prosperity. Instant analysis since the collapse of the financial system in the fall of 2008 has produced no end of ideas about what to do--ranging from those of free market ideologues (let the market do its work and damn the consequences) to extreme government interventionists determined to keep the animal spirits of capitalism penned up.But if there is anything worse than toxic financial assets it is toxic ideas. We need to re