IT'S surreal; akin to gliding on the overhead LRT in Kuala Lumpur looking over slum squatters below.

The visitor to New York this past week, intent on traversing the twilight bestriding day and night, could walk the six kilometres from Wall Street to the United Nations headquarters on East 42nd Street.

Until a year ago, light years separated the two constellations. In a sense they still do, cheek by jowl though they unwittingly found themselves in the competing meeting rooms of the UN.

Global economist Jeffrey Sachs would have had high hopes for world focus on the retreating gains to his Millennium Development Goals (MDG).

Yet once again, the fight against world poverty was sidelined, thwarted yet again by that terminator of global action George Bush, unwitting though it might have been this time.
In Bush's eighth and final appearance at the UN General Assembly, the US president, who had looked with such disdain on the global community as to liken its annual gathering to a wax museum, had finally come to seek its moral authority to bolster his domestic cause.

Bush needed the US Congress to pass the US$700 billion (RM2.4 trillion) rescue package to lift America -- and the world -- from the catastrophe that Wall Street financiers had taken the world to. At the cost once again of advocates battling world poverty.

The MDG was to be the main theme at this 63rd General Assembly. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had called world leaders together on Thursday to review progress at the halfway point of the global plan.

You wouldn't know it, going by the headlines dominated by the hand wringing over the end of American capitalism as we know it, and the decimation it has wrought on the share prices and retirement nest eggs of the rich.

The focus of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is no less diverted, in his address to the assembly.

The MDG spell out the promises made in 2000 by UN members, prime among them the halving of extreme poverty and hunger from 1990 levels by 2015. "We are running out of time," Ban had said earlier this month, in releasing a report on progress.

It showed that aid had fallen 8.4 per cent last year, after a 4.7 per cent drop in 2006.

Yet the MDG is one of the more successful of UN initiatives, going by a World Bank report on the number of people who had been lifted above extreme poverty, defined as living on less than US$1.25 a day.

People below that level had dropped from 29 per cent in 1990 to 18 per cent in 2004. This was projected to go down to 12 per cent by 2015.

Yet the mood at the UN is sombre.

As economists, people in business and academics tell the New Sunday Times, people tend to put a tighter hold on their wads in tougher times.

Macquarie Group investment banker Simon McKeon holds out the possibility, though, of the hitherto (relatively) rich -- now having felt the pain of loss -- empathising with the plight of the poor.

Questions may be asked at a broader level. What ramifications might this crisis in American capitalism have on claims to competing models on how people -- countries, markets and society -- organise themselves?

There will be those suspicious of the efficacy of the laissez-faire free-market system retreating from tentative steps they might have taken down that path, premised on the success of America.

Others antagonistic towards the Bush administration's unilateralism would view the market failure with all the schadenfreude they can imagine.

Yet others might contemplate the prospect of a reassessment of individual positions, the way the US-led invasion of Iraq changed the "end of history" conviction of political scientist Francis Fukuyama of the end point of liberal democracy.

There is no question among those who spoke to the New Sunday Times that the financial crisis would trigger widespread reappraisal of how the free market works.

But the system is not broken, they insist. Market economist Saul Eslake would not "throw the baby out with the bath water".

Eslake, chief economist of ANZ bank, offers the robustness of the Australian economy as evidence that one cannot tar free-market economics with the same brush.

"Market forces are still the best means of determining what gets produced, how, by whom, at what price and for sale to whom," he says.

The problem on Wall Street had been that screen jockeys had got away for too long with talking up paper money than they were in minding companies that made solid goods.

Eslake is in good company with McKeon and academic Ian Ramsay in his view that what's needed is transparency and more vigilant regulation.

"What we don't need is more regulation," says McKeon, executive chairman of the Melbourne office of Australia's most successful homegrown investment bank, the Macquarie Group.

Still, Ramsay, professor in governance at the University of Melbourne, is in no doubt the crisis has done damage to the argument for less government in all spheres.

There will be a rethinking of the boundaries between politics and economics in the way the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are viewed, compared with attitudes towards these institutions in the time of the 1987 Asian financial crisis.

At a practical level, economic failure of the magnitude in the US does the world's poor no good. To the extent Americans are living off money borrowed from the world, funds drawn to repair its economy would be money diverted from development aid.

On the other hand, the political will to extend aid might multiply, Ramsay echoes McKeon.

Aid activist Tim Costello sees parallels in Roosevelt's New Deal (http://tinyurl.com/4cwrc) in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

"(President Franklin) Roosevelt reasserted social values more than profit," Costello told the New Sunday Times, taking a break from his meetings in New York.

Essentially, what the MDG are about is akin to Roosevelt's New Deal. "What we need is New Deal leadership," says Costello, chief executive of World Vision.

Back in Melbourne, Costello's office is gearing up for the MDG Make Poverty History campaign to Stand Up & Take Action, set for Oct 17-19.

At the grand cathedral of St Paul, Archbishop Dr Philip Freier on Thursday led Anglicans, Australia's second-largest Christian group, in lunchtime prayers for the MDG.

McKeon, noted advocate for corporate social responsibility, is working on a summit of Australian business as chairman of Business for Millennium Development (http://b4md.com.au/) set for Oct 24.

The hope is that out of the ashes of Wall Street, the social ideals of the New Deal will rise above the unfettered markets of profit.