"But there was also serious concern that the United States had not policed its markets carefully enough to prevent the damage to its economy and others, making it much harder to raise money for the world's most vulnerable people.

" 'The global financial crisis endangers all our work,” said the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, who used his opening remarks at the General Assembly to question the reliance on free markets. 'We need a new understanding on business ethics and governance, with more compassion and less uncritical faith in the ˜magic" of markets.'

"But for some leaders, the Bush bailout plan seemed hypocritical given the tough course Washington has often advised struggling nations to take.

" 'What you are seeing here is the letting off of some political steam,' said Mark Malloch Brown, a British cabinet minister and former senior United Nations official. 'They are all remembering the very hard, unforgiving advice that they got from American financial institutions' to "deflate your economy, let your banks go to the wall," he said. "There is a resentment at what they would see as a further evidence of double standards.'

"President Nicolas Sarkozy of France described the crisis as the worst financial mess since the Depression of the 1930s and the financial system as "insane." He called for a summit meeting in November to determine how to address the problems and to develop greater international regulations of financial markets. Many leaders echoed that latter demand.

"Mr. Sarkozy also said that at a news conference he had talked with Wall Street bankers, but that they claimed not to know who was responsible for the mess. When banks and hedge funds hand out fat bonuses, they are all willing to gloat about their success, Mr. Sarkozy said, "but when there are deficits we don't know who is responsible."

"Yet doubts were being raised not just at the United Nations but farther afield, with Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, among the most outspoken. She said that at last year's meeting of the Group of 8, she had strongly urged both the United States and Britain to be more rigorous in supervising financial activities, and even offered specific proposals to be applied to banks and other institutions.

"But the United States was not interested, she said. She also seemed to express a certain exasperation that the United States was now asking Europe for help, after inflicting damage on the rest of the world that could have been avoided.

" 'We did what we were supposed to do,' she said in an interview with Münchner Merkur, a German newspaper. 'We adopted a decent E.U. regulation on the national statute books," but "when it came to it, the Americans said, "That's not for us.' "

It's about time that this worst American administration in modern history gets its nose rubbed into the arrogance and hypocrisy it has exhibited towards other nations and the disastrous mess it has created.