Is the world ready for what Simon Johnson Atlantic Monthly writer states, that “what we face now could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression—because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big”?
As an optimist we stand by our assertions that the wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump “cannot be as bad as the Great Depression,”
but writer Simon Johnson concludes that this view is wrong.
The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.
Simon Johnson, a professor from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund during 2007 and 2008, and writer for the Atlantic Monthly, ( who blogs about the financial crisis at baselinescenario.com.
