“Liberalism failed” is increasingly a mantra among some American conservatives. By “liberalism” they don’t mean the ideology of what most of the world calls “social democrats.” They mean classical liberalism, or the ideology of lassize-faire.

Despite massive government and central bank stimuli, the global economy is seeing a concerning rise in defaults and delinquencies. The main central banks’ balance sheets (those of the Federal Reserve, Bank of Japan, European Central Bank, Bank of England, and People’s Bank Of China) have soared to a combined $20 trillion, while the fiscal easing announcements in the major economies exceed 7 percent of the world’s GDP according to Fitch Ratings.

In a bit of ironic vandalism, San Francisco protestors painted “bastard” on a bust of Miguel Cervantes and defaced it in other ways. It’s hard to imagine what the motivation was behind attacking the Cervantes bust, beyond, of course, total ignorance of who he even was. Cervantes was a sixteenth-century writer who penned Don Quixote, possibly the most influential work of Spanish-language literature ever written.