The financial crisis and the economic, political and geopolitical responses to that crisis are essential to understanding the changing face of the world today. But to understand their significance we have to do two things. We have to place the banking crisis in its wider political and geopolitical context. And, at the same time, we have to get inside its inner workings. We have to do what the UN General Assembly in September 2008 could not do. We have to grapple with the economics of the financial system.
