Oct. 16 marked the 25th Annual World Food Day, an occasion whose arrival and departure received little media attention or governmental fanfare. Evidently, much of the world media and governments are consumed with an economic crisis of epic proportions.
There is hardly any disagreement that Wall Street's woes are man-made. Regardless of what terminology one wishes to apply — miscalculations, greed or wholesale failure in the U.S. capitalist system — the fact is that the U.S. economic crisis is not a fleeting phenomenon and no quick fixes are to provide a magic remedy.
In an interview with Fox Business Network, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson expressed regrets, unusual for any top U.S. official, for the economic "mistakes" that are promising a global recession for years to come. "We're not proud of all the mistakes that were made by many different people, different parties, failures of our regulatory system, failures of market discipline that got us here." However, he promised that the U.S. "will mitigate the impact on the real economy and we'll get this financial system working again."