My apologies to T. S. Eliot, but September, not April, is the cruelest month. Before 9/11/2001, there was 9/11/1973, when Gen. Pinochet toppled the Allende government in Chile and ushered in a 17-year reign of terror. More recently, on 9/15/2008, Lehman Brothers went bust and torpedoed the global economy, turning what had been a Wall Street crisis into a near-death experience for the global financial system.
Two years later, the global economy remains very fragile. The signs of recovery that desperate policymakers claimed to have detected late in 2009 and early this year have proven to be mirages. In Europe, four million people are unemployed and the austerity programs imposed on highly indebted countries such as Greece, Spain, Italy, and Ireland will add hundreds of thousands more to the dole. Germany is an exception to the dismal rule. Read more