America, still reeling from our financial meltdown and climbing unemployment rates, has tried its best to place the blame on someone. Most peple blame Bush for deregulation of the financial industry and exploding deficits. Others look back to Alan Greenspan's excessive trust in the power of the market. Still others lay the blame on greedy investment bankers and loan officers for gambling with money they didn't actually have and preying on prospective home owners.

Last night, however, Columbia University professor and renowned economist Bruce Greenwald told a rather stunned audience of Columbia students that none of these are to blame. Rather, the forces of global capitalism have finally brought a longstanding global economic crisis to America.

Greenwald looked back to the Great Depression for perspective on the current crisis. He insisted that though people then, just as now, blamed greedy bankers for the stock market crash that "caused" the Depression, the bankers were not to blame. In fact, the crash didn't even cause the Depression, but was just a manisfestation of global economic turmoil, the real cause of which was ... agriculture. Believe it or not, the cause of the Depression was a glut of agricultural products flooding the market due to increased production. This had numerous ramifications, including decreased exports for nations that depended on agriculture as the backbone of their economies. This problem was only solved by Wolrd War II, which brought agricultural production to a halt and forced people into cities as the battle war raged in Europe.

Greenwald's point is that crises like the Depression aren't caused by an economic group, and definitely cannot always be explained by the actions of a government. Instead of blaming bankers and Bush, Greenwald suggested that the current crisis is the result of natural economic forces, and that America is only experiencing a global epidemic that has been making the rounds for the last twenty years.

Global economic crises have been a mainstay since 1990, when Japan experienced a stock market crash and entered its "Lost Decade". In 1997, South Korea, Thailand, and a handful of other nations suffered similar crashes. The epidemic hit Russia (which is still suffering), Brazil, Venezuela, and other nations in 1998. The point is that this crisis is not new to anybody besides America and other developed Western nations.

It is also not necessarily the result of anything a government has done. Greenwald pointed that while everyone exalts Alan Greenspan for using monetary policy to steer America through good times in the 90s, nothing he did could have averted this crisis, and its likely that America's success was due to global forces rather than Greenspan's policies. He used the analogy of a child wildly turning the steering wheel of a parked car. The child can turn the wheel all he wants, but the car isn't going anywhere. The real cause of the crisis, according to Greenwald, is the natural balance global surpluses and deficits. If one nation has a surplus, another nation must have a deficit to keep the global economy in balance. Japan shed its deficit in the 90s as a result of its crisis by importing less goods and exporting high end electronics and cars. The same happened for other nations. Thus, somebody had to run catastrophic deficits at some point. This time, it just happened t be America.

While th audience might not have agreed with everything Greenwald had to say, it was clear that he had done his research and was very passionate about this topic. He shed light on an interpretation of the crisis that is seldom given the time of day in these days of polarized politics and faux-populism. It was refreshing to hear a detached, historical approach to our current crisis.