An excellent article about the effects of an unregulated market.

It's interesting commentary. Context: American history (or world history, if you'd rather) 101. Economic/social theory seems to go in waves - 'market freedom', resulting chaos, regulation, regulatory rigidity, deregulation, chaos, reregulation - and over periods of 30 or years or more. Eventually everything carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction (that should be in quotes).

I think it's good journalism because it contextualizes the particulars of a present-day economic story with the right amount of historical background.

Peter Goodman is not quite as uncritical cheerleader as Thomas Friedman but he's close here. This is the Corporatist apology for another market gone stupid and ugly. The article casts it as a speed-bump and ultimately calls for resumption of the same deregulation and "free market" behavior with little thought to any of the real issues. There is no thought to what it means that Arab and Chinese capital has purchased significant portions of key US financial institutions nor to the macro-economic significance of the "capital infusions". It is an attempt to recast disaster as a momentary glitch. This is a forgettable bit of feel-good filler that will never be remembered as useful after the mess sorts itself out. People should read ... More »

This is one of the best articles I've read in a long time in terms of all the criteria I have used to grade it. It doesn't even take a careful re-reading of it to absorb all the information. It is possible that an intense interest in the subject, over the years, has kept my mind focused on it that makes me believe that I can judge this article on its journalistic merits.

The author found the right subject, but pays undue deference to the stink tank apologists for unfettered capitalism while telling the story. One forgets that without police, the best profession for maximizing profits is to be a thief. With large corporations wielding economic clout greater than many nations, there seem to be no police. Witness Enron, Chevron in Burma and Ecuador, Haliburton of Arabia, Chinese Army corporations, and insider trading at Harkin Oil. The social contract needs to be redefined and, unlike during the last seven years, enforced.

This piece takes 2 pages to makes a point that seems obvious. Article:" ... when things go wrong, demands grow for the government to step in and make them right." Duh.

Why the question mark?

I wouldn't call this article "comment." It strikes me as more "news analysis." But it does seem to make a fairly obvious point--that many people see the need for regulation as a result of the problems in the housing industry.

He sets up a straw man and then knocks it down. No one except a few extreme libertarians is or has been advocating darwinian capitalism. A lot of his claims are dubious such as the widening gap between rich and poor (he means between rich and prosperous middle class). That he praises Hugo Chavez and the Chinese ruling clique tells us something about his ideology.

This opinion piece is better written and fairer than most that appear in this publication. It does label the left-wing and libertarian sources correctly, which is to the credit of the author. However he has little historical perspective. The current mortgage crisis is no bigger than the banking crisis of the late 1970s through the late 1980s. The use of the global warming issue is unfortunate as it argues against the author's premise of a need for government controls, since many Kyoto signatories have failed to limit carbon emissions despite government controls, while the U.S. has done better than most signatories in conttrolling emissions without using government regulation.