Is capitalism dead?

You know things are bad when you see someone on Wall Street holding a sign saying, “Capitalism is Dead,” said Eduardo Porter in The New York Times. That might be a bit of a stretch, but “the financial crisis sweeping across the world still has a ways to run,” and “chances are that the world that will emerge from this will be unlike the world we know.”

The transition will be “painful and protracted,” said Harold Meyerson in The Washington Post. When it’s over, Wall Street will play “a diminished role and Washington a larger one.” So it’s not capitalism that’s falling by the wayside, it’s the “unregulated capitalism” we call Reaganism.

Capitalism isn’t the problem, said Investor’s Business Daily in an editorial. It’s our confidence that’s shot. And the federal government needs to do something to lift everybody's spirits, pronto, because “excessive gloom” will cost us all a fortune.

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This is the way capitalism has worked in practice, said Satyendra Nayak in The Washington Times, since the British economist John Maynard Keynes rescued it “from the quicksand of the 1930s.” Usually, the markets correct themselves, but every once in a while “unorthodox government intervention” is required to keep the engine humming.