financial cycles

In The Atlantic, article "The Quiet Coup" does a good job contextualizing the US's current crisis as the same one the IMF has dealt with in many emerging economies over the past decades. Basically, oligarchs gamble during a boom, get bailed out by the government, and the costs are pushed onto the lower classes until the whole system breaks down. Once the government is willing to cut loose at least some of its oligarchs (it's a game of musical chairs, really), then the IMF steps in with loans.

Other aspects that are well explained:

the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

Plus, of course, the fact that everyone in charge of the Treasury is or was on the Goldman payroll.

From Russia, with regression analysis

I stole that title from Andrew Leonard. It was just too good. His summary of the article is probably better than the real thing (He recommends instead the NYRB's "Russia's Managed Democracy")

The latter article has an excellent historical summary of the foundations of Putin's presidency, the reasons it has been so successful, and then a really interesting cultural survey of present-day Russia that paints it as "retro-tsarist".

In outlook on near-future political scene, Putin's could choose to extend his term and the parliament would do it. He has evidently been reading one Ivan Ilin, "then a semi-Fascist émigré in Germany." From this the author concludes that he would not move a step closer to dictatorship ,"since this would require too great an ideological upheaval." I'm not sure why it would, nor am I sure this Ilin was 'semi-Fascist' (whatever that means!) - from his bio at the Michigan State archive of his papers, he was fired from a post in Berlin for refusing to propagandize Nazism in class. (He seems an interesting case: Lenin so admired his analysis of Hegel that he ordered him released! Counter-example to Bukharin / Rubashov in the later Purges.)

And the original article that Leonard reviews is about two classes of Russian oligarchs that emerged in the Yelstin era: old Soviet insiders and the ousider new capitalists who bought up industries (and happened to be Jewish). These latter became changed by the Soviet institutional culture (...of corruption!). When Yelstin's term ended they tried to pick a strongman-seeming puppet... but got an actual strongman.