"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." — L.P. Hartley, English novelist
It must now be obvious that, economically speaking, we're in another country. Things we once took for granted no longer apply; things we never imagined occur all the time. We've entered a zone of ignorance where familiar experience and ideas count for less. "Thirty years ago, if you'd said that the United States and Europe were going to be the centers of financial crises, people would have thought you were crazy," says economist Fred Bergsten. The unforeseen is now routine.
Profound changes to the global economy contributed to today's crisis and make it harder to resolve. Bergsten — director of the influential Peterson Institute for International Economics — cites three: