[T]he financial crisis can be best understood as the final catastrophic stage of a process of dismantling the protective institutions that made Western European capitalism politically sustainable …

[S]hort-term policy changes can have long-term effects on the health and well-being of the population.

[G]iven paltry real wages and the soul-crushing and skill-devaluing experience of long-term unemployment, fewer Americans are working at all.

At least one good thing may have emerged from the crisis: new international lending institutions led by developing nations are challenging and complementing the old US-dominated regime.

Politicians proved unwilling to do the hard work of challenging vested interests and convincing electorates of the need for more profound reforms in the aftermath of the crisis.

“In the course of the Great Recession, already fragile black and Hispanic middle-class households lost huge amounts of wealth, which had often been painstakingly accumulated over many decades.” Third in a series on social mobility around the world .

The United States is unrepaired and still vulnerable; Europe is hobbled and encumbered by the patchwork straitjacket of its political economy. The rest of the world, less directly affected by the crisis, is actively searching for something different.

The failure of public institutions to rise to the occasion by preventing the economic crisis from mutating into social disaster has bred disillusionment with parliamentary democracy and brought the far right and extreme left into the political mainstream.

[N]either the far right nor the ‘anti-European populists’ are on track to win a significant victory in the upcoming European Parliament elections.

The press is full of diagnoses of the Argentine collapse. Most blame the Argentine political class. There is surely truth in this, and it is an opinion shared by millions of Argentines. But this drama has a larger, less easily personalized setting: tax evasion, the stubborn problem of Argentine exports, and global financial volatility.