Word: walls
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...Greed. Our absolute faith in the markets, fed by Wall Street, combined with the declawing of our regulators to undermine our financial system. (See 10 ways your job will change...
...endured not one but two market crashes - one at each end of the decade. You might recall the first Wall Street crash, when swooning tech stocks tanked the market from 2000 to 2001, not long after the Nasdaq hit an all-time high of 5049 on March 10, 2000. (Recent levels: 2150-2200.) The economy went into a recession that now seems laughably mild. What followed wasn't funny at all: the most divisive and confusing presidential election in history, a discombobulated drama that we once thought could occur only in the Third World...
...question the continental security we had until then rarely worried about. We waged war in Afghanistan that drags on and today is deadlier than ever. Then came our fiasco in Iraq. Don't forget the anthrax letters and later the Washington, D.C., snipers and the wave of Wall Street scandals highlighted by Enron and WorldCom. (See a photo-essay on 9/11 first responders...
Perhaps we were lulled into complacency by the exuberance of the end of the Cold War. It was a deception brought on by an unusually positive historical continuum. First, America and the Allies won World War II; then, 45 years later, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, we defeated communism too. After that, maybe we believed the world would be forever free of conflict. Some thinkers called it the end of history. Well, history did not die. It came roaring back. The old conflicts did indeed wither, but new and virulent ones arose...
...Wall Street? By facing the music now. Toughen up borrowing requirements by banks. Increase oversight, especially when it comes to regulating derivatives. Perhaps enact a 21st century version of Glass-Steagall. And don't allow any institution to become too big to fail. Does that mean some countries may get ahead of us in terms of financial innovation? Sure, but so what? For much of this decade, both England and Iceland were considered friendlier to capital markets than the U.S. England is now threadbare; Iceland is bankrupt...