Who made the best of the now-busted boom? You'll never guess
...
Brazil didn't do it by accident. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva used the latter half of the boom years to build on a trick pioneered by his predecessor, economist Fernando Henrique Cardoso: Rather than viewing the high-spending social state and the free-market, free-trade capitalist state as polar opposites and swinging between the two competing models as if on a pendulum, unite them into a single force (duh) and let them reinforce one another.
Mr. da Silva's supporters called it "social capitalism," and it remained unpopular with both socialists and capitalists through much of the boom. Today, in a crisis that has defied the orthodoxies of conservatism, socialism and liberalism alike, nobody's laughing at Lula.
...
[u]http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090117.DOUG17/TPStory/Focus[/u]
Like I always say ... no one perspective can possibly be the whole solution.
DOWN WITH EXTREMES!! 
