ARTICLE: Global Stocks Plunge as U.S. Crisis Spreads Sell-Offs on All Major Exchanges, By Neil Irwin and Zachary A. Goldfarb, Washington Post, January 22, 2008; Page A01

America has lived through an era of unusually cheap money thanks to a confluence of global economic trends, none of which were sustainable ad infinitum (a statement that approaches cliche in this global economy that now features so many moving parts). So now the corrections and rebalancing come, the trigger being almost irrelevant, the point being there had been a lot of innovative securitizing of debt in recent years, which--as with all such innovations--is both good and bad. Good in that it creates new instruments for additional people to discount costs and risks over the long haul as they build their futures, but bad in that whenever innovation strikes in financial markets, somebody always runs too far with that ball--hence new rules are triggered. To globalization's critics, this rebalancing-triggered-by-crisis signals the inherent instability of the global economy, or the "death throes" of this or that aspect of America's "global dominance" or what have you. The reality is more plain: our globalized economy is simply becoming more multipolar even as it becomes more interconnected and interdependent. "Coupling" and "decoupling" happen in the same breath, across too many avenues to count. So it's not who's up and who's down that matters, but who's drawn closer together and who's driven more apart. But yes, expect much useful and useless chatter on this subject in coming weeks, especially from the Davos conference. Be prepared to be bombarded with shocking declarations of a "new order." Then remember how many "new orders" you've lived through over the past 20 years and relax.