Quote Originally Posted by thir View Post
And a huge bank crisis.
Also the work of the prevous administration, which dismantled all the controls that were meant to prevent it, because, you know, unfettered capitalism is the engine of prosperity.

There's a conspiracy theory that they knew perfectly well that the economy was riding for a fall, but the crash was supposed to happen after the election, so it could all be blamed on the Dems. If true, this shows that they couldn't get anything right, from conquering a bankrupt country with a crippled army and a divided population, to creating an economic disaster. But the sheeple are still blaming Obama, so I guess it worked just the same.

I think it's not so much about nations: it's more that free market capitalism, like Soviet communism, is a system that has been tried till it crashed. What China and India have in common is a model that mixes a powerful State and entepreneurial capitalism, having come to it from opposite political directions; most of their problems are about getting the balance of state regulation and enterprise right, and stopping the capitalists taking too much power. Europe used to run on versions of that model, till we were persuaded to try the American method of taking off all the controls and letting the money-jugglers do as they pleased. Which worked wonderfully till the Ponzi schemes collapsed.