Remember the age of globalization, if you can. The world was flat. High finance was king. Swelling economic prosperity had lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. Capitalism, in a variety of configurations, stretched from one end of the earth to the other. Even individual states were fading in importance, and the threat of a great-power war had all but come to an end. How quickly that utopia has been shattered. In short, the world is very much round again. Investment banking has collapsed. The global financial crisis is elbowing the poor aside. Corruption and rampant irresponsibility have resulted in a bear market as haunting as any since the Great Depression. Most of all, the state is back in force, as governments around the world assuage their ailing domestic economies with hulking stimulus packages. It is a momentous shift, so much so that some, like John Gray at the Guardian, believe it is a historical turning point. He recently wrote that the impact of the financial crisis on America's global influence is "as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union," calling it the collapse of "an entire model of government and the economy."
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