View this link:

http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/253en.htm

An excellent and brief piece by renowned sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein:

We are getting accustomed to all sorts of breakdowns of taboos. The world press is full of discussion about whether it would be a good idea to “nationalize” banks. None other than Alan Greenspan, disciple of the superlibertarian prophet of pure market capitalism, Ayn Rand, has recently said that we have to nationalize banks once every hundred years, and this may be that moment. Conservative Republican Senator Lindsay Graham agreed with him. Left Keynesian Alan Blinder discussed the pros and cons of this idea. And while he thinks the cons are a bit bigger than the pros, he was willing to spend public intellectual energy writing about this in the New York Times.

One shouldn’t forget Wallerstein’s prescience regarding the Iraq War, not to mention all of his other short commentaries dating back to 1998 (archived here).