Yet this time around, as Thailand faced an equally destructive crisis, the king has been unable to perform any such function.
But when the Norwegian Nobel Committee selects the E.U. for a peace prize just when Europe is going through a major and potentially destructive crisis, it is obvious that, once again, the Norwegians have chosen to send a political message.
This bears further study, but it would be hard to disentangle the behavior of short sellers from genuine hedgers trying to protect their long positions.There is case for questioning the social utility of synthetic CDOs: they added to the complexity, opacity and leverage in the financial system that made a destructive crisis more likely, with all the attendant externalities.
"The world is facing previously unseen consequences of the expansion of global speculative financial capitalism which brought us the destructive crisis of 2007-2008.
May the legacy of this appalling and destructive crisis in Japan be the abandonment of such faulty and brutal doctrines, so that the people of Japan and of the world may now turn to the possibilities of what can be achieved to restore financial stability as well as energy and job security.
This has led to a series of increasingly self-created and self-destructive crises, including the recent self-created fiscal-cliff fiasco, the solution to which is going to hurt the economy and job growth this year, making our unemployment problem worse.
Milosevic, who had served as the head of the Belgrade Bank, more or less engineered what the Serbian economist Mladjan Dinkic has called "one of the most destructive hyperinflationary crises in human history," in order to concentrate economic power in the hands of his criminal clique.
In effect, he is asking why his country should be vulnerable to the destructive currency crises sweeping the world, including neighboring Brazil, and, why, instead of trying to keep the peso tied to the dollar, he shouldn't make life simpler by using the dollar itself.
This could spare Portugal a destructive political crisis.
Britain is in the midst of an ever more socially destructive housing crisis.
