The global financial crisis was a true system perturbation, revealing the gap between widely perceived risk and actual underlying risk in the world's increasingly integrated financial system. As with any such vertical shock, the resulting horizontal waves continue to be felt long after the initial blow. When gaps in capabilities and rule-sets were subsequently discovered, the world's major economies effected changes, like shifting economic oversight from the G-7 to the expanded G-20 and updating the Basel banking accord. In a world without true global government, these surges of great-power cooperation constitute a critical reassurance function, letting us know that an international commitment, however vague and informal, exists to backstop each nation's individual backstops already in place.
Read the entire column at World Politics Review.
Monday, November 22, 2010 at 9:55AM 
Reader Comments (3)
So, which leaders and exploiters will use this opportunity to promote political-economy transformations? Will our media folks notice them, and the process? If they do, will they share the insights with the public?
I don't follow the logic of endorsing Bloomberg's rants as being dead on the mark. Demeaning the opposition does provide insight on the weaknesses of the attacker's argument.
Where progressives/liberals and conservatives have/will "always" differ is on the issue of centralization vs. decentralization of power. Not a new argument. U.S. Founding Fathers design of the U.S. political system represents one of the better grand strategies for managing human nature through the decentralization of power. The challenge for our political system is how best to accommodate globalization in alignment with our system of government.
W. Edwards Deming, whose work with the Japanese after WWII was recognized by Fortune magazine as among the greatest contributions in business history, remarked that if he was to reduce his message to just a few words, it all had to do with reducing variation - something our Founding Fathers certainly understood. Deming estimated in 1986 that it would be another 50 years (2036~) before the variability paradigm was more commonly understood. Deming was an optimist.
Tim,
I did not specifically target the opposition in that comment. Read more closely. I decried a national leadership; I did not single out Republicans there.