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.
The current global downturn, the worst since the Great Depression 70 years ago, pounded the last nail into the coffin of globalization. Already beleaguered by evidence that showed global poverty and inequality increasing, even as most poor countries experienced little or no economic growth, globalization has been terminally discredited in the last two years. As the much-heralded process of financial and trade interdependence went into reverse, it became the transmission belt not of prosperity but of economic crisis and collapse.
One of the most significant consequences of the collapse of neoliberal economics, with its worship of the "self-regulating market," has been the revival of the great English economist John Maynard Keynes.
Not only do his writings make Keynes very contemporary. There is also the mood that permeates them, which evokes the loss of faith in the old and the yearning for something that is yet to be born. Aside from their prescience, his reflections on the condition of Europe after World War I resonate with our current mix of disillusion and hope: