America is still an English country
Americans have been enjoined, as we approach our country’s 250th anniversary, to be a bit more grateful. Good advice. It is not just the freedom of speech and the purple mountains’ majesties we should be taking stock of. It is also our knack, in recent decades, for miseducating ourselves, failing to read the signs of the times, making wrong choices – and then profiting from the fallout. In the global financial crisis that ran for a decade after 2008, blunders in American financial engineering, from complex derivatives to mortgage-backed securities, bankrupted debtor countries and cost several others their sovereignty, most notoriously Greece.
