An Outsider's Perspective

I recently parachuted into the crucible of the American policymaking debate when I was invited to present alongside Robert Shiller of Yale at a private summit for Obama administration officials on the future of housing policy. There it struck me that the world I perceived was conspicuously different to the one my American colleagues could see. In analysing why, for instance, Canada's, New Zealand's and Australia's financial systems were in such radically better shape, I began to realise that there was a fundamental frailty in the foundations of America's financial architecture. This has largely been responsible for precipitating the current crisis and propagating it around an increasingly interconnected world.