Don’t let Boston and Brooklyn turn into Bangkok.

We continue, in other words, to claim exceptionalism, even as we acknowledge that the Swedish bad bank worked. Whether this is a failure of will or imagination, it is rooted in word games about the problems we are facing. We see the lessons of inaction wrought in real concrete and steel in Thailand. And we see, after they admitted to themselves they needed a bad bank to fix their economy, their rapid recovery. The consequences of not creating a powerful bad bank are already blighting our countryside and cities. And private bad banks like PennyMac, run by people whom we want to punish, will instead profit. When I looked around Bangkok, I could see our entire country in microcosm in its haunted skyline: stalled development, empty exurbs, ghost towers.

(Photograph of a tower in Bangkok by Wendy Ploger)