It took two years for crumbling oil prices to bring the Soviet Union to its knees in the mid-1980s, and another two years of stagnation to break the Bolshevik empire altogether.

Russian ex-premier Yegor Gaidar famously dated the moment to September 1985, when Saudi Arabia stopped trying to defend the crude market, cranking up output instead.

"The collapse of the USSR should serve as a lesson to those who construct policy based on the assumption that oil prices will remain perpetually high. A seemingly stable superpower disintegrated in only a few short years," he wrote in 2007.

Lest we engage in false historicism, it is worth remembering just how strong the USSR still seemed. It knew how to make things. It had an industrial core, with formidable scientists and engineers.

Vladimir Putin's Russia is a weaker animal in key respects, a remarkable indictment of his 15-year reign. He presides over a rentier economy, addicted to oil, gas and metals, a textbook case of the Dutch Disease.

"Russia is already in a perfect storm," says Lubomir Mitov, Moscow chief for the Institute of International Finance. "Russia is fundamentally crippled. They have outsourced their brains and lost their technology. It looked as if Russia was strong during the oil boom but it was an illusion and now they are in an even worse position than the Soviet Union," he says.

Athens, Greece.  How far can a modern economy sink?

The Greek economy is entering its fifth year of decline. Nominal gross domestic product is about 28 percent lower than it was four years ago. The official unemployment rate is 27.5 percent (as though the decimal point matters, given the poor quality of the data).

The unemployment rate for young people is about 60 percent. Nonperforming loans continue to rise. The privatization program continues to fail, in part because of an absence of bidders.

In a paper posted earlier this month, leading Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis of the University of Athens and the University of Texas at Austin argues Greece is "a failed social economy." The following are several of his examples:

One of the most entertaining opportunities that will emerge in 2007 will be using Barack Obama to fight Islamofascism.

He is the product of a black Moslem from Kenya, Barrack Hussein Obama, and a white atheist from Kansas, Shirley Ann Dunham, who met at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.  That is why his middle name is the same as Saddam's:  Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.

His first name is taken from the Islamic term in Arabic for "blessed," baraka, used in the Koran.

His father deserted the family when Barack Jr. was two and returned to Kenya.  His mother then married another Moslem studying at UH, Lolo Soetoro from Indonesia.  He moved with his mother and stepfather to Jakarta when he was six, where he attended a Moslem medressa (religious school).

That makes him a Moslem.  That he denies that he ever was and is a Christian instead makes him, in Moslem eyes, also something much worse:  an apostate.  Apostasy in Islam is punishable by death.

So ingrained is the bad-news bias of the intelligentsia that the plummeting price of oil has mostly been discussed in terms of its negative effect on the budgets of oil producers, both countries and companies.

We are allowed to rejoice only to the extent that we think it is a good thing that the Venezuelan, Russian and Iranian regimes are most at risk, which they are, and which is indeed good news.

Yet by far the greater benefit of the oil price fall comes from the impact on consumers. The price of Brent crude oil in Europe has fallen from about $115 a barrel in June to about $86 today (10/22), while crude in the US is at $82.

That will make a tank of gas cheaper (though not by as much as it should, because of taxes) but it will also make everything from chairs to chips to chiropractic cheaper too, because the cost of energy is incorporated into the cost of every good and service we buy. The impact of this cost deflation will dwarf any effect of, say, a fall in the price of Exxon shares in your pension plan.

To whom would you be willing to trust with all of your financial and tax information: 1) close family members; or 2) the U.S. government and foreign governments, including Russia?

For the last several decades, global liberty-haters have dreamt that all financial privacy would be eliminated. They have sought out a variety of excuses to act as Peeping Toms peering into your bank accounts.

In the 1980s, their big push was to enact "anti-money laundering" legislation, with the claim that it would make catching drug dealers and other assorted criminals easier. The United States passed its first anti-money laundering law in 1986 -- despite the fact that no one could objectively define "money laundering", because it is not an action but an "intent" to act unlawfully.

As a result of all the global anti-money laundering regulations, total compliance costs for financial institutions are now in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Basic banking and other financial services have been reduced and even eliminated for tens of millions of people around the world. Have all of these regulatory costs done any good?