There were competing theories on how so many pillars of finance in the U.S. crumbled so quickly.
In her view, "a moment of great innovation" could be at hand.In "The Blue Sweater", her recently published autobiography, she describes her past frustrations working in such pillars of finance and development as Chase Manhattan bank, the African Development Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Solyndra declared bankruptcy in September, costing 1,100 workers their jobs and putting in jeopardy the public money that was a central pillar of its financing.
Indeed, Nobel Prize-winning economist Merton Miller, a pillar of orthodox finance, recently told me that behavioral finance was little more than "a lot of so-called anomalies searching for a theory".
Yet if Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev are to invoke the lessons of the past in dealing with Russia's alcohol epidemic, they need to look more broadly at the dubious historical role of alcohol as a pillar of state finance.
Profits from the sale of vodka accounted for 23% of government revenues in Soviet days and once again could be a pillar of state finance.
Take Bernie Madoff, known as a pillar of the finance world, a senior luminary in the pantheon of the Wall Street elite, and a "magician".
That, in fact, is a pillar of REDD finance and part of its beauty: it rewards indigenous people for acting as guardians of the rainforest, because it compensates them for being providers of an ecosystem service.
Standard-setting, by the way, is another pillar of REDD finance, but the Atlantic makes only passing reference to it - and when it does, it gets it wrong, referring to the Verified Carbon Standard as the "Voluntary Carbon Standard" - a moniker that VCS abandoned two years ago.
The new case is an attack on the other main pillar of federal campaign finance regulation: limits on contributions made directly to political candidates and party committees.
