What actually started this downward spiral? Who cares! Any little thing can set off an avalanche once the conditions are right. Probably the proximate causes were a slump in the ... market and a rise in the ... exchange rate, but if they hadn't triggered the crisis, something else would have.

One of my favorite ... writers.

Somewhere in cyberspace, the ghost of de Chardin is smiling.

Asia: What Went Wrong | CNNMoney | 2 March 1998

The first act was the story of the bubble. It began, we now think, with bad banking. In all of the countries that are currently in crisis, there was a fuzzy line at best between what was public and what was private; the minister's nephew or the president's son could open a bank and raise money both from the domestic populace and from foreign lenders, with everyone believing that their money was safe because official connections stood behind the institution. Government guarantees on bank deposits are standard practice throughout the world, but normally these guarantees come with strings attached. The owners of banks have to meet capital requirements (that is, put a lot of their own money at risk), restrict themselves to prudent investments, and so on. In Asian countries, however, too many people seem to have been granted privilege without responsibility, allowing them to play a game of "heads I win, tails somebody else loses." And the loans financed highly speculative real estate ventures and wildly overambitious corporate expansions.
[...]
Soon enough, Asia was set up for the second act, the bursting of the bubble. The bursting had to happen sooner or later. At some point it was going to become clear that the Panglossian values Asian markets had placed on assets ...

Tool.

Anniversary gift | EconomistView | 1998

If you use the term "microeconomics" in a WordPerfect document, the spelling checker will flag it and suggest "macroeconomics" instead. The spelling checker has a point. You see, macroeconomics has gone out of fashion. Not only academic economists but also some of our most influential economic pundits seem to regard it as bad manners to talk about recessions and recoveries and how governments might alleviate the former and engineer the latter. Ordinarily reasonable people now argue that the business cycle is a trivial matter, unworthy of attention when compared with microeconomic issues like the incentive effects of taxes and regulation. Trying to do anything about recessions is bad for growth, they say, and even thinking about the business cycle is a bad thing, because it distracts people from what really matters.

A reader cannot begin to catalogue the contradictions of a NYT columnist who descends periodically to deduce microeconomic truth from aggregated data, so seeming to validate commonsensical outrage, while never, ever advocating state enforcement of fiduciary "attitudes."

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.