We have perhaps finally returned to the secure paths of common sense. This great crisis was necessary to put things right-side-up. And they were far from that. For example, the vocabulary of dominant finance had come to describe as "underlying" those assets that served as the pretext for derivative products (including securities), although they constituted those products' sole identifiable value. Historians will undoubtedly regard with curiosity this period when "the markets" took themselves for the Market; probability calculations for economic appraisals; bonuses for results; financial or accounting "creativity" for wealth creation.... Enough: imprecations having followed on stupefaction, it's pointless to add to them. Except to say that - in the great necessary dialectic between the economy and finance - finance took itself for the essential, when it is ancillary only. Now, it remains to sketch the great reinstatement of order in the economic and financial theater.

    The first and biggest reordering of forces will undoubtedly occur between the worlds of creditors and borrowers. We already see confirmed that, within the overall dereliction, such recourse as there is resides in the big creditors (Asian and Oil funds) and in the most solvent entities (governments). The systemic strategy of debt-leverage for speculative purposes ended up discrediting the true virtue of borrowing, which is to solicit financial means to bring concrete plans to fruition. The greedy calculations on the bottom (subprimes) and the political facilitation at the top (doping consumption) met to encourage societies of generalized indebtedness which cannot continue to live on credit when credit is exhausted even between bankers. In consequence - the second restoration - populations with net savings will recover the advantage over populations with zero - or even negative - savings. Once financial virtuosities are eliminated, the real solvency of economic spaces and their actors will, in fact, recover their benchmark role in the evaluation of plans and results. Asia and Europe will probably regain some advantage from the reestablishment of those criteria. And the United States, with its well-known adaptability, will perhaps effect its Copernican revolution.... The third return is that - in strength - of governments. The political analysis required is to observe that in the event of crisis, it is the financial capacities of the entire collective that alone are equal to the stakes. Europe has just asserted a spectacular unity of action in that regard. It has, finally, confirmed that the market does not function well unless it, like everyone else, observes the laws of superior collectives. Nothing less than a historic crisis was required to rehabilitate such simple ideas.

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    Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.