As Brown poses as FDR, look ahead to a very new capitalism

Charles Leadbeater, the acclaimed innovator and new media analyst, predicts a transformed landscape: a new ‘networked’ capitalism in which the state plays a part but cannot pick winners — a system that is chastened, subdued and fraught with social danger

We should be searching for a new kind of capitalism, and not just according to the far Left. That is the message from Washington dinner parties and in the pages of the Financial Times.

For most people the next year will not feel like a search for a brave new economic model: it will be more like hand-to-hand combat to keep hold of what you have.

Yet the world is being turned upside down not by wild-eyed revolutionaries but sober central bankers and civil servants. High-octane, free-market financial capitalism has been devoured from within as the financial markets lost faith in the system they created. The City of London, once the jewel in the crown of the free-market empire, is being turned into a toxic debt recycling plant.