Greece has bought some time with a new package of financial support, but the country is not out of the woods yet.
I have been presenting my new book The Globalization Paradox to different groups of late. By now I am used to all types of comments from the audience.
One does not have to spend much time in developing countries to observe how their economies are a mish-mash, combining the productive with the unproductive, the First World with the Third.
Suppose that the world's leading policymakers were to meet again in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to design a new global economic order.
When Greece was bailed out by a joint eurozone-IMF rescue package back in May, it was clear that the deal had bought only a temporary respite.
Everybody agrees that the world economy is ill, but the diagnosis apparently depends on which corner of it you happen to inhabit.
In the early days of the global financial crisis, there was some optimism that developing countries would avoid the downturn that advanced industrial countries experienced.
"Turkish democracy is at a turning point," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced after winning a crucial vote in a referendum to change Turkey's constitution. "We are sitting an important exam."
If Europe doesn't find a way to reactivate the continent's economy soon, it will be doomed to years of gloom and endless mutual recrimination about "who sabotaged the European project."
It may have been fear of communism that agitated governments when Karl Marx penned the opening line of his famous manifesto in 1848, but today it is the dread that market sentiment will turn against them and drive up the spreads on their bonds.
In the world of economics and finance, revolutions occur rarely and are often detected only in hindsight. But what happened on February 19 can safely be called the end of an era in global finance.
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