It was to be the annus mirabilis of Olympic China, and ended as the annus horribilis of liberal capitalism. Hardly had the Beijing Games closed when a financial earthquake with New York as epicenter caused a bank run that was unprecedented in scale and scope, toppling the stock markets and forcing government to bail out affected companies by injecting large sums of money, which nevertheless did not prevent the crash of big banks like Lehman Brothers or even entire countries like Iceland. 

The financial catastrophe immediately brought on economic recession, and the bailout plans cast the shadow of a fiscal crisis, putting the capitalist system on the edge of the cliff: exceeding the limits of a cyclic crisis, the earthquake that began in the central economies spread to the emerging countries, placing the planet on the verge of a systemic breakdown, further aggravated by the absence of leadership in the American superpower, where Barack Obama’ s election in November was a flicker of hope in a dark year...