Part of the psychology of the Greenspan Bubble – a policy of bank credit expansion that distorted market signals and led to the over-valuation of certain assets, such as real estate – has been the vaunted overestimation of America's staying power as a global hegemon. Standing alongside the hubris that brought down the financial edifices of Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs is the foreign policy corollary: the triumphalism of the neoconservatives, who imagined that American military power could solve all the world's problems: or, at least, most of our own. They sneered at the "declinists," like Paul Kennedy, who pointed to "imperial overstretch" as the cause of our impending economic and geopolitical demise.