In your main leader you pillory Peer Steinbrück, Germany’s finance minister, and Christian Noyer, governor of the Bank of France, for their myopia concerning the looming economic crisis (“World on the Edge,” October 4, 2008), but it is truly amazing that their myopia has long been nearly universal. Ever since the global crisis started gathering momentum more than a year ago, nearly every luminary anywhere around the world has kept repeating that the credit crunch is limited to America and its banking sector. Given America’s importance in the world economy, and given the importance of banking in economic activity, every undergraduate majoring in economics would be able to argue against myopia of this ilk, but it has nonetheless persisted unabated. Amazingly, it is still persisting on the periphery of the global economic system, where hapless luminaries keep spewing the same old claptrap. In line with your own credo, economics should be close to the core of every curriculum.