Watching from the sidelines

As the global financial crisis unravels or unfolds or whatever it is difficult for people like me, an interested though relatively uninformed bystander, to make a lot of sense of events. Perhaps even those who are presumed to know what is happening don't know all that much themselves. After all they've been the ones running the system which is now wobbling.

"Crisis" is often used loosely but the capital C version of the word does seem to apply at the moment as international financial leaders meet and try to cobble together a "solution". Almost everyone seems to agree that an important, probably essential, element of any solution (or whatever it's called) will be a government ie taxpayer funded bailout of the system. In other words the free market advocates whose voices have dominated economic and financial discourse for so long have been forced to admit (doubtess they'll put it differently) that they have been following false prophets (or gods).