When he served in the Commerce Department during the first Clinton administration, Garten was a leading proponent of America's global push. Today, he sees the dark side of the trend. The United States has a Federal Reserve Board to act as a backstop in a bank crisis. The Securities and Exchange Commission serves as a cop for the stock market. Bank deposits are federally insured.
Global capitalism has no such bulwarks.
No one took responsibility. We have been fooling ourselves that the IMF would act as a lender of last resort. They have not. They failed, in Asia and now in Russia. Russia's decline also shows the power of global price trends.