The financial crisis  What next?  Global finance is being torn
apart; it can be put back together again  See article  Readers'
comments    You said Finance is the brain of the economy. For
all its excesses, it allocates resources to where they are
productive better than any central planner ever could.  It seems
to me one of the biggest problems with American capitalism is
the assumption that profitable is the same as productive. I have
no doubt that packaging mortages, creating derivitives and
highly leveraged trading all these financial vehicles is very
profitable. It is not clear to me that, once a mortage is
granted, that all this fancy money movement increases the
productivity of anything. It's easy to envision a market where
reasonable mortgage loans are made where risk stays with the
lender and borrower, where loans are available to all who want
and can repay them and where Wall St is a fraction of it's
current size. That world existed for a long time in America, and
still exists many places.  I don't d