The exposure of massive accounting fraud at WorldCom may not signal the final crisis of capitalism or, as Margo Kingston suggests, the decline and fall of the American empire?
But it surely does signal the end of the kind of American capitalism (what Edward Luttwak called Turbocapitalism) that was presented to the world in the 1990s as the only path forward. The crucial ideas, including shareholder value, incentive-based management and the claim that stocks are always and everywhere the best investment now look every bit as discredited as the Japanese model that was touted in the 1990s.
Update 1:14
The NYT agrees with my take, saying U.S. Businesses Dim as Models for Foreigners