The other day that the world was changed: September 15

This month marks the second anniversary of September 15, 2008, a date that will be remembered as one of the worst moments in the history of the global economy. On that day US investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering a major financial crisis and dramatically worsening a worldwide recession whose effects are still being felt.

The date also matters in the history of international politics, accelerating what is destined to be the most important international political trend of the second decade of the 21st century: the growing financial obligations of the United States government. Coping with these obligations will limit the resources available for American foreign policy, thereby reducing the nation’s international role. Because that role is so important – the United States acts as the world’s de facto government, providing to other countries many of the services that governments typically furnish to the societies they govern – this will have a major, and in all likelihood dangerous, impact both on the global economy and on international politics. That impact is the subject of my new book, The Frugal Superpower: America’s Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped World...

The impact on all countries, not only the United States, of the growing financial obligations of the US government could be serious indeed, especially since no other country or group of countries is willing or able to do what America does around the world. With so much wealth destroyed and with the sharp downturn in production, the direct, short-term economic consequences for the world of the September 15, 2008, events have already been severe. The indirect geopolitical consequences could, over the long run, turn out to be even worse... http://thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100908/OPINION/709079918/1080

No state deserves that fate, not even Alaska. After all, they've all suffered enough.

Made sure that his buddies' company Goldman Sachs would not be imperiled by the success of their rival Lehman, so he set up strategies to ensure that Lehman would have no ability to fend off the dooms day scenario.

Were Geithner working privately and manipulating officials into doing this, he would be charged with violating RICO provisions and perhaps he'd be in jail.

But he was working for the New York Federal Reserve, and is now comfortably housed in an office down the hall from our President's Oval Office.

A day that surely will live in infamy.