It’s hard to overstate how deeply Americans despised their government’s response to the global financial crisis. It has helped shape the last decade of American politics, fueling distrust of powerful institutions and speeding a drift toward ideological extremes. The engineers of the response succeeded in their immediate goal, to preserve the financial system. But they — or, more precisely, they and their political leaders at the time — also left fissures that threaten to undermine the system they sought to preserve. A Republican administration has gleefully cast aside trade deals, for instance, and the energy among Democrats is around d emocratic socialism .

Source: New York Times September 12, 2018 09:01 UTC