Russell Taylor, one of the writers of Alex, the cartoon of city life which runs in the Daily Telegraph's business section, has written his own version of James Stewart's speech from It's A Wonderful Life.

It captures just how Alex Masterley - the caddish hero of the comic strip - would describe the events of the past week.

BBC - Today

Watching some financial stocks just get wiped out in recent months, I often hear a voice in the back of my head, and it is the same voice as one of those dealers in Las Vegas who coolly tells you as he sweeps up your chips after you’ve busted in blackjack: “Thank you for playing, ladies and gentlemen.”
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Now is the time for coolly sorting out what markets can do best and what governments need to do better.
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But we also need to understand the uniqueness of this bubble in order to identify where smart government needs to step in.
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In the long run, though, regulators need to find ways to limit the amount of leverage investment banks or insurance companies can take on at any one time, because given how intertwined they all are in today’s global economy, one bank blowing up can now take down many.
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“We do not need a regulatory ‘surge’ on Wall Street,” he added. “We need a complete rethinking of how we make global financial markets more transparent and how we ensure that the risks within those markets — .many of which are new and many of which are not well understood even by the experts — are managed and monitored properly.”

In sum, government’s job is to police that fine line between the necessary risk-taking that drives an innovation economy and crazy gambling with other people’s savings in ways that threaten us all. We need to make sure that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas — and doesn’t come to Main Street. We need to get back to investing in our future and not just betting on it.

Op-Ed Columnist - Keep It in Vegas - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Making and enforcing new rules is necessary, but that will not be enough. The nation needs a new perspective on the markets, one that acknowledges the self-destructive bent of unfettered capitalism and its ability, unchecked, to wreak havoc far beyond Wall Street.

Editorial - Wall Street Casualties - Editorial - NYTimes.com

Philosophical debates arise at the oddest times, and in the heat of this election season, one is now rising in Republican ranks. The narrow question is this: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be vice president? Most conservatives say yes, on the grounds that something that feels so good could not possibly be wrong. But a few commentators, like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Frum and Ross Douthat demur, suggesting in different ways that she is unready.

Op-Ed Columnist - Why Experience Matters - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has accused the US of orchestrating the conflict in Georgia, possibly for domestic election purposes.

hahaha

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Putin says US was behind conflict

President George W Bush has said the US will use military aircraft and naval forces to deliver aid to Georgia following its conflict with Russia.

doesn't he think it might be seen as provocative to send in US troops even if only in a humanitarian role. Now I have the music from the end of Dr Strangelove in my head. All together now "we'll meet again don't know where don't know when"

BBC NEWS | World | US forces to deliver Georgia aid

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown says there is "no justification" for Russia's military action in Georgia.

I am not convinced that there is "no justification" for Russia's actions but it has not been a limited or proportionate response and the Georgian leader was either being bloody stupid in starting military action or expected the West to come to his aid and was trying to manipulate us. This sort of brinkmanship by the Georgian government is extremely dangerous. However the Russian military has been let off the leash and the Russians should negotiate not flatten Georgia. Talk at the UN by the US about Russia invading sovereign nations sounds hypocritical after Iraq but something needs to be said and the violence needs to be brought to a stop. If South Ossetia wants to be independent like Kosovo then so be it. However the Chechnyans didn't get that choice so it is extremely hypocritical of the Russians to argue the case now and self serving.

The situation makes the Caucusus seem like the Balkans at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century with tiny states playing very dangerous games thus extending an invitation to join NATO to Georgia becomes extremely dangerous and a short cut to a global conflagration. Do we have to repeat history and get drawn into their petty vicious squabbles? Repeating the Great Powers games of previous eras is stupid and resulted to 2 World Wars. Russia is reasserting its military power. Our best long term strategy is to stop fueling their economy which is only propped up by oil and natural gas. Short term there is a lot of nationalism in play in the region and Russian pride. The horse we have in this race is stability. The only meaningful weapon we have are sanctions and neither Europe or America is placed or ready to use that weapon in a meaningful way we have to start acting to change that situation. We are largely impotent to respond but we note their behaviour and should start being a little more frosty to the Russians and more frosty to those who seek to manipulate us in their conflicts with Russia. At the moment there is a buffer between NATO and Russia and I think we need to put some diplomatic effort into maintaining that buffer rather than eroding it with invites to NATO.

BBC NEWS | Politics | UK warns of Russia 'catastrophe'

for the past month, some private equity firms have been promoting what they claim would be a relatively pain-free fix of the nation’s banks. And the Federal Reserve — which must know that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is — has yet to say no, as it should.

Private equity firms say they are ready to invest huge amounts in ailing banks — provided the Fed eases up on the regulations that would otherwise apply to such large investments. The firms’ desire to jump in makes perfect sense. Bank shares are cheap now, but for the most part, are likely to rebound when the economy improves. The firms’ push for easier rules, however, is a dangerous power grab, and should be rejected.

Under current rules, if an investment firm owns 25 percent or more of a bank, it is considered, properly, a bank holding company, subject to the same federal requirements and responsibilities as a fully regulated bank. If a firm owns between 10 percent and 25 percent of a bank, it is typically barred from controlling the bank’s management. To place a director on a bank’s board, an investor’s ownership stake must be less than 10 percent. The rules exist to prevent conflicts of interest and concentration of economic power. They protect consumers and businesses who rely on well-regulated banks, as well as taxpayers, who stand behind the government’s various subsidies and guarantees to banks.

To maximize their profits, private equity firms want to own more than 9.9 percent of the banks they have their eye on and they want more managerial control — and they want it all without regulation.
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Worse, the private equity firms are exploiting the desperation of banks and regulators. They know that banks are desperate to raise capital and that doing so is a painful process bankers would rather avoid. They also know that regulators and other government officials, many of whom where asleep on the job as the financial crisis developed, want to avoid the political fallout and economic pain of bank weakness and failure.

Editorial - The Banks and Private Equity - Editorial - NYTimes.com

We’re about to enter our 19th consecutive year of Truman-envy. Ever since the Berlin Wall fell, people have looked at the way Harry Truman, George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson and others created forward-looking global institutions after World War II, and they’ve asked: Why can’t we rally that kind of international cooperation to confront terrorism, global warming, nuclear proliferation and the rest of today’s problems?
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Groups with a strong narrow interest are able to block larger groups with a diffuse but generalized interest. The narrow Chinese interest in Sudanese oil blocks the world’s general interest in preventing genocide. Iran’s narrow interest in nuclear weapons trumps the world’s general interest in preventing a Middle East arms race. Diplomacy goes asymmetric and the small defeat the large.

Moreover, in a multipolar world, there is no way to referee disagreements among competing factions. In a democratic nation, the majority rules and members of the minority understand that they must accede to the wishes of those who win elections.

But globally, people have no sense of shared citizenship. Everybody feels they have the right to say no, and in a multipolar world, many people have the power to do so. There is no mechanism to wield authority. There are few shared values on which to base a mechanism. The autocrats of the world don’t even want a mechanism because they are afraid that it would be used to interfere with their autocracy.

i'm not convinced a League of Democracies is the answer because it is not remotely apparent how that would be any different from another talking shop
the main problem is as the article points out small groups having a veto power

the example of the Irish No vote is a good example -- we have many many shared values across Europe and have a League of European Democracies but that didn't stop the Irish blowing progress out of the water by taking a very narrow blinkered approach

finding consensus in a multipolar world is a fundamentally difficult problem and unless and until we have a global government will remain so
the only way forward is through pooling sovereignty and by surrendering the right to veto and nation states are notoriously loath to do so
(after all you Americans ended up having a civil war over the issue of federal rights versus state rights -- centralization v decentralization )

Op-Ed Columnist - Missing Dean Acheson - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

When Israel swapped prisoners and corpses with Hezbollah this week, a flood of propaganda followed. Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, depicted the return of five prisoners and the remains of 199 Lebanese killed in the 2006 war as a way of achieving Hezbollah's original goal when it kidnapped two Israeli soldiers - an act that ignited the war.
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But beyond all tactical and political considerations, there is something morally repulsive in the hero's welcome given the most famous - or notorious - of the Lebanese prisoners released by Israel. Samir Kuntar had been sentenced to 542 years in prison for killing four people during a raid in 1979. Kuntar executed a father, Danny Haran, in front of his 4-year-old daughter. Then he killed the little girl by smashing her head against a rock with a rifle butt.

This is the creature Nasrallah hailed as a resistance hero, the figure Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh called a "hero who sacrificed 30 years of his life for the Palestinian issue."

All wars are inhumane. But not all warriors lose their humanity.

absolutely

A strange kind of hero - International Herald Tribune