You wake up in the morning and once again the financial weather report calls for the Apocalypse followed by brief showers of despair. Seeking a ray of hope, you turn on the television to watch a Capitol Hill hearing. There in the hot seat is the man who holds the entire U.S. economy in his hands.

And he looks like Harry Potter.

You listen, eager for new ideas, but somehow much of what he says seems dispiritingly predictable. Is this the best America can produce? Aren't great crises supposed to bring forth great men? Did President Obama really just compare Timothy Geithner to Alexander Hamilton? We need Roosevelt and Churchill. Even watching Obama at times, it seems that we've elected — despite their smarts and earnestness — a government of stumbling technocrats whose solutions either fall short or go too far. It's enough to make you want to pull the covers back over your head.

Go online, meanwhile, and you find the HTML version of the French Revolution, with left and right calling for poor Tim to be strung from a lamppost. You actually start feeling sorry for the guy. Arianna Huffington snipes that "the issue isn't his delivery, it's what he's delivering." Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz concludes that Geithner's plan "amounts to robbery of the American people." Next you find Connie Mack, Republican senator from Florida, fulminating that "quite simply, the Timothy Geithner experience has been a disaster. ... America needs and deserves a Treasury secretary who can truly lead us forward."

On that point, at least, he's right. We do need strong leadership. The world is in chaos. There are riots from Greece to China. Iceland has collapsed, and Mexico teeters on the edge. Pakistan is broke, melting down and awash in nukes.

This is not just a global economic crisis. It's a global leadership crisis. Obama is still finding his footing, Gordon Brown is on his way out, Hugo Chavez is nuts and Wall Street management is larcenous. Isn't there someone somewhere with decent values, a firm hand on the tiller and at least one big new idea? Where have all the leaders gone?

Tim Geithner is only an illustration of the problem. Everywhere you look, it seems the men and women in positions of power are receding. The closer you look, the smaller they get. Once there were titans running the financial and business worlds, lions of the legislature, great statesmen — individuals who weren't just victims of history but who shaped it to their wills.

How did we get here? In hindsight, the sequence of history is evident. After Vietnam and Watergate and oil crises and the failures of Eurosocialism in the 1970s, many people bought into the idea of government as the problem. The markets were efficient and would tell us what and who should be successful. Here in the most powerful country in the world, Republicans and Democrats alike bought into the philosophy. The values of business — profit above all, wealth as the prime measure of success, the short term over the long term — became society's values. We came to expect too much of our business leaders and too little of our political ones.

Then it all came undone. Bubble after bubble burst, in emerging markets, technology and real estate. The gap between the richest and the poorest started to rival historical extremes. During the past few years, the world's most important leader, the U.S. president, became reviled and disrespected. And as this latest crisis has unfolded, the myth that the people in charge knew better collapsed faster than an over-leveraged investment bank. The result has been a leadership void.

So if we face a leadership deficit that rivals our economic deficit, who's going to bail us out of it?

Certainly people and ideas will ultimately fill this void, and institutions will emerge reshaped by them. The question is when?

But gradually, answers do emerge in times like these. As Daniel Roth recently wrote in a perceptive article in Wired magazine, tough times force-feed innovation, while good ones often cultivate complacency. The Depression produced inventions such as television and nylon, and it refocused IBM into an eventual computing colossus. The recession of the early 1990s gave birth to software giants and the first Internet companies. The bursting of the dot-com bubble led to Apple's re-inventing itself and the entire music industry with the iPod. Individual business leaders from Thomas Watson to Steve Jobs came to the fore or re-emerged in such times as well, much as a new generation of political leaders was defined by the Depression and World War II.

In each case, the leaders who succeeded looked beyond the crisis, beyond old ways, and found something new. They kept their eye on the post-crisis world.

The president's economic team is so uniformly drawn from one time and place — Bob Rubin's farm team — that they look like a poster child for the early warning symptoms of groupthink.

Geithner & Co. have floundered in breaking free of the ideas that dominated in the 1990s, but they have also been bold about reintroducing government's role where it must be greater.

Thus far, there is as much to worry us as there is to comfort us.

But to paraphrase Roosevelt, Obama can only be as great a president as the people let him be. If citizens had turned on Roosevelt early, he would have faltered, along with the nation's recovery. What is often lost in such discussions is the idea that leadership implies collaboration. We get the leaders we demand and thus deserve.

Lately, it feels harder to live up to our share of the bargain. Imagine if partisanship, impatience and shortsightedness make it impossible for this new cast of leaders to have a full chance to define this new era. It is worth remembering that prior to their greatest successes, Lincoln and others as diverse and illustrious as George Washington and Mohandas Gandhi were written off as failures.

A big part of the answer in our quest for leadership resides with us. We are the ones who will embrace the ideas and empower those who act on them. We are the ones who will decide what we accept or demand as the proper role of government, of markets and of America in the world. This will require more reason than emotion, more focus on core values than on economic value creation, more of a long-term view and less focus on instant gratification.

After all, our wrong choices in these arenas helped create our leadership vacuum in the first place.

David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment, is the author of "Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making." He wrote this commentary for The Washington Post.