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I think that list is a bit spurious. What's more, it's already five years old.
1) The BRICs are beginning to look like paper tiger. Brazil and Russia? Yikes. Basketcases. China? The biggest asset bubble in history. Only India doesn't look like it's facing imminent meltdown.
2) The Arab Spring was a dud, despite the most naive hopes of people such as the NPR policy wonks. Syria has spiraled into a deadly civil war. The Arab Brotherhood won the Egyptian elections only to become terribly unpopular. Libya was essentially thrown into chaos by the American intervention, then left to its own devices. I'm not sure what naive fool felt that the Middle East culture would be compatible with democracy, but it was a vain hope.
3) The Crash of 2008. The pat explanation was that it was because of greedy mortgage lenders, etc. etc. But as someone who was on the periphery of that industry for umpteen years prior to the crash, it had a great deal more to do with government subsidizing mortgages beginning in the mid90s, and expecting more lenient underwriting as a result. I mean, the same thing happened in Australia at the beginning of the 20th Century and the plains states during the 20s. But, hey, this time was different.
We're actually seeing precisely the same phenomenon at work today in the student loan crisis. Government made student loans cheap and accessible, people stopped paying attention to what their tuition was, colleges stopped worrying about reining in costs, and people just keep borrowing to keep up. I just don't think policymakers have learned from their mistakes.
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