Only Abba can save the world financial markets

At the historic moment when the House of Representatives passed Hank Paulson’s bail-out bill last Friday night — thus, we must hope, despite early indications to the contrary, significantly improving the world’s chances of avoiding economic cataclysm — I was conducting some research into the Scandinavian solution.

I don’t mean the policies followed by the Swedish government to steer its banking sector through a near-terminal crisis in the early 1990s, of which more in a moment. I mean I was sitting in the back row of a packed cinema watching Mamma Mia!, the Abba-singalong movie, and observing the impact of a mass inoculation of feel-good on a crowd that had been battered with bad news all week. I can only describe the effect as a euphoric group high — and it occurred to me that if only the global financial community could be persuaded to take half a day off, head for their nearest multiplex and lose themselves in this cheerful, escapist fantasy, maybe the panic would start to subside.