Chast. It offered this among three “Thanksgiving Recipes
from the U.S. Treasury Department”:
Six sweet potatoes
One can crushed pineapple
Your retirement accountMix everything together.
Bake until the account is completely melted.In the past, an economic catastrophe could usually be con-
tained within the nation’s borders. But this economic emer-
gency was especially scary because we are now all citizens of an
interconnected world with a linked global economy. The crisis
had been triggered by the freezing up of credit markets; that
had been caused by subprime mortgages that an underregu-
lated financial industry bundled and sliced into complex new
securities that plunged in value. The shaky new instruments
were born in the United States. But when they suddenly lost
value, investors in Brazil, Ireland, Bulgaria, South Africa,
China, and Qatar also felt the pain.
The New York Timesran a map showing affected countries
blotched with red under the headline “A Crash Heard Around
the World.” Tiny Iceland was hit especially hard. As it teetered
on the edge of economic collapse, someone jokingly put the
entire nation up for sale on eBay. In a column in the New York
Times, Thomas L. Friedman asked: “Who knew that Iceland
was just a hedge fund with glaciers?” The era when an eco-
nomic event in one nation caused a far-off ripple was clearly
over. As Friedman so persuasively argues in two recent best-
sellers, today’s world is flat and its institutions and interests so
Epilogue to the Twentieth-Anniversary Edition