No one yet knows the volume of the American real estate bubble or the volume of the Western financial bubble. They continue to remain partly hidden in the unfathomable slicing and dicing of securitization, which, by dint of securitizing the wind, harvest the whirlwind. On the other hand, the ideological bubble - in all its magnitude - appears in full light of day.

    This ideological bubble, the religion of the all-powerful market, bears a strong resemblance to what had been Communist ideology. Each reigned alone for several decades: seven for Communism; nearly four for ultra free market neo-liberalism. The immensity of the first system's lie was uncovered during the fall of the Berlin Wall. People had sensed it; independent and courageous spirits like Solzhenitsyn or Havel had written about it for a long time, but suddenly the empire of the lie was naked. Everyone understood that it had all been propaganda only, that it had all been nothing but adulterated dreams, intellectual swindles and just plain swindles. An ideological bubble with tragic consequences that were all too real.

    The present crisis recreates a comparable scenario. Since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher implemented Milton Friedman's doctrine, the neo-liberal free market ideological steam-roller swept everything out of its path. A great many company and university heads, editorialists and political officials swore only - and with what arrogance! - by the sovereign market. They had succeeded in obsolescing Keynes to the point of making people believe that even his famous aphorism that trees do not shoot up to the sky was wrong. Any dissonant, timidly social-democratic voice that recalled the virtues of a minimum of public regulation passed for a Jurassic Park holdover. And now, all of a sudden, the truth emerges. Market self-regulation is an ideological myth, the play of economic actors emancipated from all rules does not converge, but, quite the opposite, seriously diverges, abetted by the ethical shipwreck of certain financial elites. In short, the Friedman doctrine is erroneous bec ause any human mechanism with no counter-weight tends not toward equilibrium, but toward speculation, that is, toward irrationality. It's the wise Montesquieu and his theory of the balance of powers - not the market fundamentalist theoreticians - who got it right.

    So the markets' collapse figures as the fall of the Wall for free market fundamentalists. Their doctrinal bubble is as naked as the Communist bubble was in 1989. When - after so much ideological arrogance, productive of so much excess - the time comes to rebuild, it will be appropriate to correctly proportion the right mix of freedoms, rules, controls and oversight, while being careful to avoid any systemic ideology, since it's with systems that we create the most insane dreams and the greatest misfortunes.

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    Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.