Still another reality: Broad adherence to the Washington-driven international economic prescriptions of recent decades, under which the market and private sectors took over for a reduced state, is a thing of the past.

"This crisis has finished off the Washington consensus," the standard package of free-market reforms promoted by Washington and the Bretton Woods institutions to replace the state-run economies of developing countries, says Anatol Lieven, a professor at King's College London and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington. "We're going to see much greater state interventionism."

Yet Mr. Lieven adds a caveat: "That doesn't mean there's a new economic model to replace the old one," he says. "It's still much too early to know if China's authoritarian capitalism, as one example, is the wave of the future – or if its export economy might yet collapse." LINK