We have seen what happened to the "tigers" in the late 1990s, and before that to the Brazilian "miracle" of the 1960s and 1970s. There was therefore a lot of amnesia involved when people lumped together a very disparate collection of countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (the "BRICS"), and claimed that somehow together they represented an alternative driver for the world system. In fact, renewed economic growth in Brazil, Russia and South Africa depended typically on an upsurge of raw material and agricultural prices in a boom which was bound to come to an end eventually-and when it did so it would hit them seriously.
The great minds that extolled the system paid no greater attention to these contradictions in their rosy picture of Asia than they did to the underlying problems in Europe and North America. Japan had problems, they usually recognised, but this was because of the lack of wisdom displayed by a government which had never really absorbed the lessons about how a free market should operate. As late as the autumn of 2007 financial journalists, government ministers and the stars of academic economics were all agreed that capitalism had found a new long-term stability-and even some Marxists spoke of a "new long upturn". They were soon to look as foolish as those who forecast endless peace in the early summer of 1 914.
The Years of Delusion
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