Reasons to be cheerful amid financial apocalypse

On Monday afternoon I rang a Wall Street friend who used to work at Lehman Brothers. ‘What’s the mood?’ I asked him. ‘Do you think this is the turning point?’

‘Hold on a moment,’ he replied. ‘Let me just climb back in off the window ledge.’ There was a pause, then a nervous chuckle. For the half-second of that pause, I actually wondered whether he was serious. And that was just Monday: since then, things have got really frightening.

The former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan says the current financial crisis is ‘a once-in-a-half-century, probably once-in-a-century type of event’, but he’s wrong. There has never been a situation like this: the global interconnectedness of today’s markets, the speed of internet communication, the extent to which markets impact on ordinary folks’ pensions, savings and aspirations of home ownership, all make this utterly different to 1929 in New York or 1866 in London.