The economic establishment begins to question itself.

You know things are getting strange when the Secretary-General of the U.N. calls for a revolution in our economic system. You see son (leaning back in my rocking chair and hooking my thumbs under my suspenders), time was that it was the poor folk who started economic revolutions and all. Not them high-falutin' folk in their fancy motor-carriages.

Perhaps you remember the economic crisis of 2008? The near-vapourization of all that electronic stuff we call "money" was narrowly averted one Sunday afternoon in New York when Hank Paulson bullied the major U.S. banks into a wierd semi-nationalisation-cum-bailout. The recent documentary "Inside Job" is an amazing peek into the willful ignorance and outright duplicity of Wall Street leading up to the crash.
A quick refresher course in political economy is perhaps in order: Those tumultuous weeks in the fall of 2008 completely discredited the notion that the free market could regulate itself. France's president Nicolas Sarkozy famously said in a speech that the Anglo-American economic model was dead. There is no "free hand" of the market. And if there is, it is sometimes psychotic and therefore cannot be left unattended. This was a golden opportunity for a reinvigourated Left to take the lead in shaping a more fair and stable economic system. But having themselves embraced free-market ideology over the past 20 years, (neo-)liberals now have nothing to bring to the table. Indeed, the silence from the Left has been deafening.

So we are in a bizarre situation in which a Left-leaning U.S. President hires a horde of arch-suits right off of Wall Street and puts them in charge of fixing the economic crisis. That they caused. These former bankers and stockbrokers launch a massive Keynseian spending program (the most Lefty sort of Big-Gubmint socio-economic manipulation) to keep the economy ticking. Yet there has been no fundamental re-think of how this all works. Regulation of the financial markets has not been strengthened. Heck, forget about writing regulation to prevent the next crash: how about using existing laws to deal with what just happened?

The recent article in Rolling Stone asks rightly "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?". Yes, an example was made of the most outlandish Ponzi-schemer, who has been locked up for 150 years (for 10 points, can you name him? Last name begins with "M"). Now it seems that people are starting to ask pointed questions as to why the "vampire squids" at Goldman Sachs, who made a killing swindling private investors and then connived their way into kajillions of dollars that was meant to help the swindlees, are not in Leavenworth.

All this is to put into context the recent statements by the Secretary-General of the U.N. who called for a revolution in our economic system. He feels that the banking system is out of control and that the environmental challenges of climate change require a new economic model. Remember, we're talking a mild-mannered career bureaucrat here, not some jungle-dwelling quat-chewing colonel. Of course, he means "revolution" in the intellectual sense and is not actually calling on people to start throwing Molotov cocktails. Still, the frankness of his message - delivered at a major economic forum to old men in suits - is shocking. Yes it sounds like crazy talk, but in light of the aforementioned scams that seem to form the basis for a large part of the financial sector, perhaps Ban-Ki Moon is on to something.