News from around the world confirming the growing breadth and depth of the global financial crisis doesn't usually mention the unexpected benefits. These benefits may be difficult to imagine at the moment given the staggering evaporation of wealth. Stock market losses alone are estimated at $30 trillion. So far, Europe has spent $3.36 trillion shoring up its banks. And the United States, the cause and epicentre of this financial disaster, has orchestrated "rescue measures" that could total as much as $8 trillion, more than twice the $3.6 trillion, in today's dollars, it spent on World War II (Newsweek, Dec. 22/08).

So, what went wrong and what benefits could accrue from such a mess?

This financial crisis seems to have been caused by two general factors. First, suggests Sumit Paul-Choudhury (New Scientist , June 21/08), was the increasing number of dissatisfied people who were taking increasing risks because they expected increasing returns from a rising market. Such an expectation factor explains why capitalist economies tend to move in boom-and-bust cycles. Expectations escalate until rising numbers of investors become a tide of "Irrational exuberance" — the term once used by Alan Greenspan, the former chairperson of the US Federal Reserve — thus causing a bust. And second, the US exacerbated this process with years of progressive deregulation in its financial institutions. When the global financial system finally discovered that huge sums of unsupported mortgages — the present estimate is $5 trillion — were bundled into supposedly sound investment packages, all monetary instruments became suspect, the entire system froze and markets plunged.

Variations of this process have occurred before. The bursting of the so-called "dotcom" bubble in March of 2000 was one of the most recent. But other examples litter capitalism's economic history: the Great Depression that began with the market crash of 1929; the collapse of stocks in British railways in 1840; the infamous ruination of Dutch speculators when the "tulipmania" of the 1630s came to an abrupt end.

In each case, however, unintended benefits came from these collapses: the "dotcom" bubble left "the software and infrastructure than runs today's internet" (Ibid.); the market crash of 1929 left an industrialized America and Europe; the collapse of stocks in 1840 left Britain with the world's best railway system; the end of "tulipmania" left a vast fleet of trading ships for the Dutch.

This is the thesis presented by Daniel Gross in Pop! Why Bubbles are Great for the Economy (Ibid.). The huge amounts of money invested during economic bubbles fund the impossibly expensive infrastructures needed to reshape societies. Or, as social economist Carlota Perez contends, "A bubble is the inevitable precursor to each of the paradigm shifts by which society advances" (Ibid). And her thinking is supported by Didier Sornette, a risk specialist from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He argues that only during reckless times do individuals and businesses make the foolhardy investments that fund revolutionary new technologies (Ibid.).

Apply this process to the current financial crisis and several benefits are evident. The subprime mortgage fiasco built thousands of homes that will eventually be available at a significantly lower price when the economy finally stabilizes. Oil at nearly $150 per barrel prompted investors to pour money into clean and renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, and to explore technologies such as electric cars, fuel-cells, better batteries and plastic substitutes. The trauma being experienced by the American automobile industry should result in more practical and fuel-efficient vehicles. And the crash of the credit market may even show consumers the folly of living on a treadmill of perpetual buying and debt.

People who are traumatized and unsettled by economic disruptions are receptive to the changes that invite paradigm shifts. Every crisis presents opportunities that should not be wasted. The trick for visionary and wise political leaders is to use these disruptions to advance their societies toward greater quality and viability.

These opportunities are clearly sensed by Barack Obama in the United States. His country is primed for change. Under his guidance, America may be reborn as a more just, equitable, efficient and globally responsible country, a better manager of its economic, human and environmental resources, and a guiding force in humanity's challenging journey to a more harmonious relationship with nature.

This mood in America may even be contagious enough to infect Canada, a country whose environmental record has been judged as abysmal by the international community. The global financial crisis offers us a chance to promote clean and efficient industries, to build infrastructure and mass-transit for making our cities better places to live, to retrofit homes and buildings so they require less energy to heat and light, to redesign forestry and fisheries and agriculture so they are healthy and sustainable, to restore damaged ecologies so they can again provide their bounty, to protect endangered ecosystems so they can continue to enrich us, to support the research and innovation that will power a pollution-free future, and to fund the education that will make us a smarter and wiser society.

We have much to do. And we have much that must be done. But we need our leaders to lead. We need their vision, directives, guidance and incentives. And they might be emboldened if they learned from each one of us that this is what we expect of them. Crises invite changes. Failures are missed opportunities.