The men who crashed the world

The new series on Al Jazeera explores in 4 episodes  how greed and recklessness led to financial collapse.

In the first episode of Meltdown, we hear about four men who brought down the global economy: a billionaire mortgage-seller who fooled millions; a high-rolling banker with a fatal weakness; a ferocious Wall Street predator; and the power behind the throne.
The crash of September 2008 brought the largest bankruptcies in world history, pushing more than 30 million people into unemployment and bringing many countries to the edge of insolvency. Wall Street turned back the clock to 1929.
But how did it all go so wrong?
Lack of government regulation; easy lending in the US housing market meant anyone could qualify for a home loan with no government regulations in place.
Also, London was competing with New York as the banking capital of the world. Gordon Brown, the British finance minister at the time, introduced 'light touch regulation' - giving bankers a free hand in the marketplace.
All this, and with key players making the wrong financial decisions, saw the world's biggest financial collapse.

George W. Bush as Pinochet?

Image via Wikipedia

Interesting news from Switzerland:

Former U.S. President George W. Bush has cancelled a visit to Switzerland, where he was to address a Jewish charity gala, due to the risk of legal action against him for alleged torture, rights groups said on Saturday.


Criminal complaints against Bush alleging torture have been lodged in Geneva, court officials say.


Quite interesting how for the first time in history a US president is risking the same faith of Pinochet (The Chilean dictator was arrested by the British Government in 1998 during a trip to London for medical treatment under charges of human right violations) and it is also a sign of how weakened the US influence on world affairs has become, few years ago the simple proposal of such an action would have been enough to start a diplomatic row against the U.S Government independently if the current administration belonged to the same party or not (after all the White House has always thought that if you create a precedent there is no telling when it could come back and bite you as well) , today not only we are not seeing any official diplomatic reaction to this indictment but also we have a former US president un-defiantly renouncing his trip.

Aside from the technical aspect of apprehending a former US President which is still under protection of the US Secret Service, the question arising in this story is how faded has the presidential figure become independently from the low popularity of a single president.

Not that Bush is the real deal here, most certainly he should have been facing some kind of judgment for his many failings as president, the real question is how weak is the current projection capacity of the american diplomacy in light of this and the Wikileaks affair? It appears quite a lot.