Incompetence or intention?

Conspiracy theorists are already floating the idea that the Bush administration intentionally allowed the financial crisis to reach the boiling point so that draconian measures could be introduced more easily. Intention is sometimes best masked by demonstrations of incompetence. How far the government intervention will go for "correcting" the economic mismanagement is the biggest unknown. For the first time, holders of dollar financial instruments might want to take seriously the heretofore preposterous idea that the U.S. government will unilaterally declare its debt null and void. Czech politicians, for their part, are still in the denial phase. They're going out of their way to dissociate the Czech economy from what is happening in the world. Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek told Euro that he "absolutely disagrees" with what the U.S. government is doing. Let's hope his failure to see the parallels with the Czech economy is merely incompetence, and not intention. [Czech Republic United States of American bailout $700bn default]