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As President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva heads to Tehran this weekend to make what many Western diplomats consider a last-ditch attempt at persuading Iran to temper its nuclear ambitions, officials in Washington have expressed concern that the effort could backfire, helping the Islamic republic to block - or at least delay - the United States and its allies from imposing sanctions.

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government-a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF's staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we're running out of time.

European banks have hog-tied their governments, replacing Parliamentary democracy with dictatorship by the ECB, which is blocked constitutionally from creating credit for governments - until German and French banks found it in their own interest for it to do so.