When I hear about the mortgage mess, I sometimes find myself thinking that at least we're wiser for it, that this was just a kind of bad first date with the global economy, but we know better now.

That is not the view of Antonio Palocci. Palocci was the finance minister of Brazil, and he spoke up, after some prompting, at this conference I'm attending. (It's filled with former ministers — the idea being that they can finally speak their minds since they've left their political jobs.)

"I had decided not to speak about this subject because I am a little too pessimistic.," Palocci said. "The question that I ask myself is 'Do we have the capability to avoid bubbles?' I think we cannot."

Bubbles are the result of "inevitable movements of the market," he said. He didn't go into detail, but I think he's talking about the growing quantities of money racing around the world, the tendency of investors to love one product to excess, the inevitable complexity of things. Other former ministers here were more optimistic and talked about how new regulations or institutions might stop bubbles, or at least keep them from growing so big. But Palocci worried instead that things might get worse as national economies merge into a single global one.

He spoke in Portuguese, so an interpreter had to put all that into English. When Palocci was done, John Snow, the former U.S. Treasury secretary, gave his own distillation. "I summarize him by saying, 'We have met the enemy and it is us.' "