The Great Unraveling

"The stranger, a Western businessman, slipped into the chair next to me at an Asia Society lunch here in Hong Kong and asked me a question that I can honestly say I've never been asked before: "So, just how corrupt is America?"

So begins one of Thomas Friedman's regular op-ed pieces in the NY Times - republished on IHT.

It is a reflective piece on how capitalism, and accompanying ethics, in the USA have gone awry.

"But while capitalism has saved China, the end of communism seems to have slightly unhinged America. We lost our two biggest ideological competitors - Beijing and Moscow. Everyone needs a competitor. It keeps you disciplined.

But once American capitalism no longer had to worry about communism, it seems to have gone crazy. Investment banks and hedge funds were leveraging themselves at crazy levels, paying themselves crazy salaries and, most of all, inventing financial instruments that completely disconnected the ultimate lenders from the original borrowers, and left no one accountable. "The collapse of communism pushed China to the center and [America] to the extreme," said Ben Simpfendorfer, chief China economist at Royal Bank of Scotland.

The Madoff affair is the cherry on top of a national breakdown in financial propriety, regulations and common sense. Which is why we don't just need a financial bailout; we need an ethical bailout. We need to re-establish the core balance between our markets, ethics and regulations. I don't want to kill the animal spirits that necessarily drive capitalism - but I don't want to be eaten by them either."

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Mahler's Prodigal Son

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