The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means  by George Soros
PublicAffairs May 2008
ISBN-10: 1586486837
ISBN-13: 978-1586486839

^{Editors’ note: Carol White blogged about the Senate Commerce Committee’s recent hearings in her commentary: Phil Gramm and The Political Scandal Behind Today’s Soaring Oil Prices.}

In his testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee, George Soros warned about the danger of a new speculative bubble in oil and gasoline, one that is driving up prices and threatening to push the U.S. economy into severe recession. He contended that this latest bubble is an outgrowth of a prolonged “super-bubble” that has been propelling the U.S. economy forward for the past 25 years.

As the chairman of Soros Fund Management and someone who accumulated a fortune on the markets by placing winning bets that the British pound would collapse in 1992 and that the Thai currency would do the same in 1997, Soros is worth listening to when he warns of allowing U.S. financial markets tofunction without effective regulation. Soros’ new book, The New Paradigm for Financial Marekts: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means is of value to everyone who is struggling to make sense of the present economic debacle, and a must read for progressive policy-makers.

 “I think it’s unconscionable to train soldiers to kill and then offer them only two years of treatment after they return to recover from the experience of killing.” So wrote Terese Svoboda after I contacted her on finishing reading Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, her exploration of the distant events behind the suicide of her uncle Don. Motivated in part by the suggestion of an emotional connection between the events at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Don Svoboda's service guarding imprisoned US soldiers soon after WWII, there's an outrage and a sadness in this book turning it from the story of a “Superman” uncle into something of a polemic. At the end of the book, she positively pounds the table:

 We need to wake up and face the nightmare, the dangling body, because we pay for the terror and torture with the minds of our soldiers. It's a symptom of the degeneration of a society when such behavior is hidden. The society begins to stink, no matter what.

What Svoboda discovered is that abuse of prisoners by the US military may have begun long before the Iraq war—and its impact on the soldiers forced to be involved (to say nothing of the impact on the prisoners) has been a factor in the veering of America from the path most of us imagined for the nation. Often, ours is an “open” society only when convenient; we hide the scars of our action beneath layers of make-up, hiding from ourselves the fact that those scars remain infected and dangerous.