(Washington Examiner Editorial) While all the focus is now on the three-ring circus in Washington vis-a-vis passing the fiscal 2011 budget the Democrats failed to pass in 2010, up in New Hampshire this weekend at Bretton Woods, the Institute for New Economic Thinking is convening a very important conference, "CRISIS and RENEWAL: International Political Economy at the Crossroads."
It's no accident they're meeting on the very same site as the Bretton Woods Conference -- formally United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference -- that met from July 1-22, 1944, during World War II to plan the postwar financial world after the expected defeat of Germany and Japan.
That's because the purpose of this weekend's conference is to reorder world finance in the wake of the near-collapse of the global financial system in 2008. Like Bretton Woods, they must expect some new calamity, with winners and losers.
The groundwork was laid a year ago at INET's inaugural meeting at which George Soros teed off with his "Anatomy of Crisis - The Living History of Last 30 Years: Economic Theory, Politics and Policy."
"I am afraid," he said, "the current discussions miss the main point: namely that the recent financial crisis was not only a market failure but also a regulatory failure.
"And what matters now is not so much who regulates, but how. Regulators ought to undertake a course of critical self-examination - Chinese style."
Maybe that's why President Obama is cool as a cucumber -- spending nearly a billion to invade Libya without breaking a sweat despite the fact we are broke, and skipping town to campaign for his 2012 re-election in the middle of tense budget negotiations.
Obama knows the world financial system is being reconfigured - "Chinese style." He may be reasoning that "George has got my back." (Read more)
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