Blame for the global banking crisis is variously apportioned to greedy bankers, lax supervision and incompetent management.
But many of the financial industry's excesses flow directly from the political cover given to its activities, especially in the US and Britain, since the Thatcher and Reagan years in the 1980s.
Within a year of Big Bang in 1986, when the City was deregulated, it became conventional wisdom to believe that management of the economy was best left to global market forces. The mantra of the market became even more pronounced when the Berlin Wall fell in 1990 and the Soviet empire collapsed soon afterwards.
Western capitalism had triumphed in the life-and-death struggle against communism; what is more, the capitalism that emerged victorious was the red-in-tooth-and-claw variety that believed in unfettered free markets where a huge derivatives industry (mortgage-backed securities being but one small part) was allowed to grow up largely unchecked and unsupervised.
After the crisis of recent weeks and months, few believe that capitalism isn't in need of urgent reform. A return to the protectionism and nationalism of the 1930s would be to see the pendulum swing too far the other way. But expect some fairly major adjustments, not tweaks around the edges, in the months and years ahead.
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