The way to deal with China would have been a broad coalition of countries that play by the rules. Instead, we've conveyed the message that big countr… - Paul Krugman

I would summarize the Keynesian view in terms of four points: 1. Economies sometimes produce much less than they could, and employ many fewer workers than they should, because there just isn’t enough spending. Such episodes can happen for a variety of reasons; the question is how to respond.
2. There are normally forces that tend to push the economy back toward full employment. But they work slowly; a hands-off policy toward depressed economies means accepting a long, unnecessary period of pain.
3. It is often possible to drastically shorten this period of pain and greatly reduce the human and financial losses by “printing money”, using the central bank’s power of currency creation to push interest rates down.
4. Sometimes, however, monetary policy loses its effectiveness, especially when rates are close to zero. In that case temporary deficit spending can provide a useful boost. And conversely, fiscal austerity in a depressed economy imposes large economic losses.

The fact is that Democrats have already been pursuing policies that are much better for the white working class than anything the other party has to offer. Yet this has brought no political reward.

Equally important, the financial industry’s political power has not gone away. Banks have waged a fierce campaign against what many expected to be an easily passed reform proposal, the creation of a new agency to protect financial consumers. Despite the steady drumbeat of scandalous revelations—most recently, the discovery that Goldman Sachs helped Greece cook its books, while Lehman cooked its own books—top financial executives continue to have ready access to the corridors of power. And as many have noted, President Obama’s chief economic and financial officials are men closely associated with Clinton-era deregulation and financial triumphalism; they may have revised their views but the continuity remains striking.
In that sense, this time really is different: while the first great global financial crisis was followed by major reforms, it’s not clear that anything comparable will happen after the second. And history tells us what will happen if those reforms don’t take place. There will be a resurgence of financial folly, which always flourishes given a chance. And the consequence of that folly will be more and quite possibly worse crises in the years to come.