The global currency crisis is still to come

Now that businessmen from Kazakhstan to California speak a single language, it’s perhaps not surprising that we endured a Babel of borrowing over the past ten years. And like all towers which reach too high, it fell — and great was the fall of it.

So great, in fact, that the financial world was overwhelmed. The debris of dislocation and default rained down upon the fortress of the financial system, smashing it to matchwood. Shocking: but all, it seems, is not lost. With screeching tyres a jeep has come into view. Who’s that at the wheel? Why, it’s King Canute! And with him, Gordon Brown, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson and the Prime Minister of Iceland, together commanding that all will be well; all must be well. The onlookers cheer at such a spectacle of initiative and timeliness.

There is certainly no doubting their energy. Promises have been made, enterprises underwritten, depositors guaranteed, expenditures accelerated, taxes and interest rates cut.