America carried Western Europe, the Middle East and Japan on its back for decades. It was rewarded with endless lectures on the evil of current-account deficits from those who had benefited from them. Oil imports and prices skyrocketed, French and Italian luxury goods and German — and Japanese — engineered products poured into the US. When George Bush Senior gave his economic message in 1992, it was to urge Americans to spend all and more than they had. This was not responsible advice.

Administrations and Congresses of both parties sat as inert as suet puddings. The mighty American economy, with its highly motivated and incomparably skilled workforce, abandoned savings and investment and became helplessly addicted to perishable consumer goods, personal debt and speculation. Millions of manufacturing jobs were outsourced. Millions of undocumented immigrants were allowed into the country and trillions of dollars were borrowed from China and Japan to buy outsourced manufacturing from China and Japan. None of it made any sense and the US itself became history's greatest Ponzi scheme. 

Given that, inexplicably, no one audible saw what was coming, it is not surprising that no one seems to have much idea of what to do about it. The Obama administration's hydra-headed economic team speaks in many tongues. But it has given few hints of what alternatives will be considered to the present forecasts of a decade of trillion-dollar annual budget deficits and money-supply increases. This is a policy that will drastically erode the dollar's value. The administration is raising taxes, always an unwise action when a country is trying to shake off a recession. But it is doing so not as quickly as it is raising expenses and making imprudent concessions to Luddite labour unions. It has given most of what is left of the US auto industry to the United Auto Workers, which is chiefly responsible for the industry's near-death experience.

Obama apparently bought into the fairytale of creating millions of green jobs making windmills and solar panels. He padded around the most inane high-level conference in world history, at Copenhagen, promoting a $100 billion annual payoff to Hugo Chávez, Robert Mugabe and other barbarous monsters for the carbon emissions that resulted from the economic growth of the advanced countries. Fortunately, the evaporation of the global-warming canards that carbon emissions had anything to do with the world's temperature eliminated this hare-brained nostrum.

The second intractable problem is that while capitalism is the only economic system that works and is incomparably the best route to economic growth — because it is the only one that is aligned with human nature's drive for more — it will always, because of that drive, arrive at the brink of self-destruction. All the fatuous claims of Gordon Brown and Alan Greenspan to manage prudently to avoid booms and busts have been exposed as fraudulent. All the well-meaning claptrap about a social market merely slows the speed of the Gadarene rush to the brink and does nothing to change the destination.

Financiers seek profits and as they have little sense of any broader interest will fall for almost any risk if temptation is dangled in front of them for long enough. This always leads to an economic crack-up, but governments almost never have the slightest aptitude to deal with the crisis. They have the duty to tackle it because they make and enforce laws, issue money, and control interest rates and the money supply, not because they have any talent at financial management or economic prescience.