"The time has come to do our mea culpa," Hans-Joerg Rudloff, chairman of the executive committee at Barclays Capital, told an audience of fellow bank and brokerage executives in London in 2002. "Argentina obviously stands as much as Enron" in showing that "things have been done and said by our industry which were realized a

"Your salary will only be about one-third of your compensation in a decent year, so your bonus is everything,"

the ability of portfolio investors to move money unfettered across national borders is a matter of controversy among economists, much more so than is the freedom of trade in goods. With regard to this aspect of global capitalism, the Argentine crisis underlines the need for major repair. It points inexorably to the conclusion that government effort

"The Argentine Exchange: Robbing Pedro to Pay Pablo" was the headline on the swap in a June 5 report by the independent research firm CreditSights. "The unambiguous winners from the exchange are the investment banks," said the report, written by Peter Petas. "The losers, ultimately, will be the Argentine people and whatever

The president's approval ratings, which were hovering at around 20 percent in July, fell to single digits by October, and a survey of Buenos Aires residents showed that half favored Cavallo's resignation.

Bond transactions are not usually the stuff of great passion. But the megacanje, or megaswap, as this one would come to be known, ranks among the most infamous deals that Wall Street has ever peddled to a government—and with good reason: For CSFB and a half dozen other Wall Street firms, the megaswap would be a bonanza, earning them more than $90 m

Thousands of demonstrators poured into the streets on the scorching day of December 19. In Buenos Aires, they marched on the Casa Rosada; in Córdoba, they destroyed the municipal government building. A televised speech that evening by de la Rúa, vowing to "assure order throughout the republic" and declaring martial law, only evoked more a

Suing a foreign government is usually unrewarding, because the government's overseas assets are generally modest in size, or completely protected from litigation in the case of embassies and other diplomatic facilities. But as Porzecanski noted, in one recent case an aggressive legal strategy had paid off for Elliott Associates, a New York–based &q

In sum, notwithstanding the recovery, Argentina's bust still ranks as globalization's biggest. Although not as directly threatening to international stability as the tensions that have erupted in the Middle East, its implications for America's ability to exercise global leadership are disquieting, as indicated by the political turn the country has