Nicole Gelinas has an op-ed appearing on the Washington Examiner's site today about the global fallout of the 2008 financial collapse. (The piece is adapted from a longer article in the new issue of City Journal, but it isn't online yet.) I asked Gelinas about globalization in our podcast interview.

Here's an excerpt of the Examiner piece, which elaborates on some of what we discussed:

The best regulations would make each nation's financial system and economy more robust to inevitable financial industry failures. Such regulations include stronger, uniform borrowing limits for financial firms and markets, so that firms cannot make hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of promises with negligible cash down.

But global politics is obscuring this reality. The French and the Germans long ago determined that the financial crisis had sprung from "Anglo-Saxon" recklessness. "The U.S. will lose its status as the superpower of the world finance system," Germany's finance minister said in October 2008. French President Nicolas Sarkozy promised that la crise would bring an end to financial "laissez-faire." It seemed inevitable that the world would get much more regulatory "harmonization."

But there is no harmonious world, only a collection of competing nations. The biggest problem with the most sensible financial regulatory fixes (and this is true of the not-so-sensible ones, too) is that each hurts one nation more than it hurts others.

Read (and listen to!) the whole thing.