MANILA, Philppijes—As his nation was in the grip of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt began his term of office by telling his countrymen and the world that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” For years, his country and the global economy had been paralyzed; once-trusted institutions were crashing down, fortunes vanishing, and nations plunging into runaway inflation and massive job losses. FDR vowed action during the famous first “hundred days” of his presidency and thereby saved not only the American economy, but possibly, democracy. For it was the Great Depression that inspired embittered citizens to embrace the emboldened prophets of fascism and communism.

The world, after fully a year of wishing and hoping it wouldn’t have to, confronted once more the dark specter of the years of the Great Depression this past week. For a time, for a crucial three to four days, it seemed the giants would come tumbling down, and the world would slide, precipitously, into financial ruin. And for a time, as in the years 1929-1933, it seemed that governments and financiers would be gripped by paralysis, as citizens in turn were gripped by panic.

At the sidelines, the routed forces of communism, and even of fascist thinking, were the only ones celebrating: toasting and boasting what they proclaimed to be a vindication of Marx, glorying in the bloodbath of Wall Street and other great bourses of the world. To be sure, in the United States, the hubris of the past decade was exposed: capitalism, indeed, was shown to be too seductive, too impossible, a thing to leave strictly in the hands of capitalists. The American government, after having allowed a bank to fail, had to step in to essentially nationalize a giant insurance conglomerate.

There is no such thing as freedom without responsibility; this is the painful lesson American officials and capitalists have had to learn, echoing the state interventionism of the Roosevelt years which had instituted bank holidays, deposit insurance, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Social Security to restore a human and humane face to the markets and the banking system. But what ashen-faced bankers and stock traders have taken to euphemistically calling “excesses” in the markets—which are of their own making, and which central banks around the world have had to come together to clean up—now, as in the 1930s, serve to demonstrate that greed has a price; but they do not, as they did not, disprove the vitality and wide preference of global publics for capitalism.

For now, at least, the intervention of central banks to stem the erosion of public confidence in the banking and stock market system, has worked. In February 2006, when George W. Bush appointed Ben Bernanke chair of the Federal Reserve (the US Central Bank), much was already made of his being an expert on the Great Depression. Over the past week, when it seemed the world was poised to replay, with dizzying speed, the collapse of markets in 1929, that expertise came to the fore, just as demands for action and proposals for reform have all taken to revisiting the Great Depression. Fear, indeed, was the enemy, and panic was its handmaiden and they were the main perils to contend with.

Which is not to say that the deep-set problems that first began to manifest themselves with the subprime crisis are going away, or that all the giant banking and other institutions recently imperiled are home-free. What has been stopped is a global economic free fall and free for all. There is both a symbolic and substantive meaning to the American government’s institution of measures, through bailouts and nationalizations, to demonstrate the “full faith and credit.” The Bank of England, Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, and the Central Bank of Switzerland (the big central banks that stepped into the markets last Thursday), are all behind such concerted moves and the state commitment to institute reforms that politicians and bankers failed to do in the 1930s.

Filipinos, on the other hand, can be thankful for the instinctive conservatism of our local bourse and bankers. While we aren’t immune to global trends, we have our own resources and reserves of prudence, to weather such storms.