Europe's crisis is now poised at the moment that divides recovery and renewal from decline and death.
What would follow the disintegration of the eurozone and – almost certainly with it – that of the European Union?
The European Monetary Union, as many of its critics maintain, looks a lot like the pre-1913 gold standard, which imposed fixed exchange rates on extremely diverse economies.
Europe's debt crisis has piqued Europeans' interest in American precedents for federal finance. For many, Alexander Hamilton has become a contemporary hero.
The protracted financial and economic crisis discredited first the American model of capitalism, and then the European version. Now the Asian approach may take some knocks, too.
The economists’ commonplace that a monetary union demands a fiscal union is only part of a much deeper truth about debt and obligation. Debt is rarely sustainable if there is not some sense of communal or collective responsibility.
For months, an increasingly frenetic, even apocalyptic, debate about the fate of the euro has been the major driver of global instability. Can Europe's common currency survive?
Murdoch's media empire is a model of the modern global enterprise – a model that is now threatened by the fallout from the scandal that started with phone hacking in Murdoch's British press operations. But the Murdochs' problems reflect the underlying weaknesses of "family capitalism."
Unfortunately, so far the world seems to have learned very little from the recent financial crisis: with the US worried by its anemic economic recovery, Europe paralyzed by fears for the euro's survival, and emerging markets wrestling with asset-price bubbles.
This year, the G-8ers are talking about interesting but peripheral issues, such as the economic impact of the Internet. Worse, they are talking about important issues, like food security, in a peripheral way.
The IMF needs a managing director who transcends political logic and can lay out the economics of the new global order. The next one should be Eastern rather than Western, an economist rather than a politician, and a visionary rather than a tactician.
EU policymakers are too pre-occupied by the real problems posed by too-big-to-fail banks, and too terrified by the potential collapse of weaker banks, to allow such a solution.
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