Good question:

Why do Asian investors depend on American capital markets? Given the near breakdown of key sectors of the American market, one might expect Asians to bring their money home. Quite the opposite has happened: Asian currencies have fallen sharply against the American dollar…

What does America have that Asia doesn’t have? The answer is, Sarah Palin – not Sarah Palin the vice presidential candidate, but Sarah Palin the "hockey mom" turned small-town mayor and reforming Alaska governor. All the PhDs and MBAs in the world can’t make a capital market work, but ordinary people like Sarah Palin can. Laws depend on the will of the people to enforce them. It is the initiative of ordinary people that makes America’s political system the world’s most reliable…

On the other hand:

"Hockey Moms," to be sure, may not be the optimal promoters of America’s future. One for one, the "Piano Moms" of China are cleverer people and produce smarter offspring.

China’s 30 million students of classical piano are one of the two great popular movements in the world today: the other is the House Church movement in Chinese Christianity. Children who play hockey will grow up to get coffee for children who study piano.

As a pool of talent, nothing compares with the educated segment of the East Asian population that has embraced and mastered Western culture. Nonetheless, Asia still can’t invest its own money at home, and seems farther than ever from that objective.

Why?

Because of endemic corruption and (therefore) unhealthy attitudes to government and personal responsibility:

The trouble is that rich Asians don’t lend to poor Asians in their own countries. Capital markets don’t work in the developing world because it is too easy to steal money.

Subprime mortgages in the US have suffered from poor documentation. What kind of documentation does one encounter in countries where everyone from the clerk at the records office to the secretary who hands you a form requires a small bribe? America is litigious to a fault, but its courts are fair and hard to corrupt.

Asians are reluctant to lend money to each other under the circumstances; they would rather lend money in places where a hockey mom can get involved in local politics and, on encountering graft and corruption, run a successful campaign to turn the scoundrels out.

You do not need PhDs and MBAs for that. You need ordinary people who care sufficiently about the places in which they live to take control of their own towns and states when required. And, yes, it doesn’t hurt if they own guns. Popular gun ownership places a limit on the abuse of state power.

And, of course, the deeper drama amidst the current turmoil is that our governments are binge-spending money they can’t squeeze from us (so they grab it from future generations), in full knowledge that the demographic base to sustain such spending is declining as fewer people in work have to support more and more elderly people (ie me, and probably you).

Decline? Meet Fall.