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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/c...y-ticking.html
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French president Nicolas Sarkozy, with a good nose for popular moods, says: "We must overhaul everything. We cannot have a system of rentiers and social dumping under globalisation. Either we have justice or we will have violence. It is a chimera to think that this crisis is just a footnote and that we can carry on as before."
The message has not reached Wall Street or the City. If bankers know what is good for them, they will take a teacher's salary for a few years until the storm passes. If they proceed with the bonuses now on the table, even as taxpayers pay for the errors of their caste, they must expect a ferocious backlash.
We are fortunate that the US has a new president enjoying a great reservoir of sympathy, and a clean-broom Congress. Other nations must limp on with carcass governments: Germany's paralysed Left-Right coalition, the burned-out relics of Japan's LDP, and Labour's death march in Britain. Some are taking precautions: Silvio Berlusconi is trying to emasculate Italy's parliament (with little protest) while the Kremlin has activated "anti-crisis" units to nip protest in the bud.
We are moving into Phase II of the Great Unwinding. It may be time to put away our texts of Keynes, Friedman, and Fisher, so useful for Phase 1, and start studying what happened to society when global unemployment went haywire in 1932.
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French president Nicolas Sarkozy, with a good nose for popular moods, says: "We must overhaul everything. We cannot have a system of rentiers and social dumping under globalisation. Either we have justice or we will have violence. It is a chimera to think that this crisis is just a footnote and that we can carry on as before."
The message has not reached Wall Street or the City. If bankers know what is good for them, they will take a teacher's salary for a few years until the storm passes. If they proceed with the bonuses now on the table, even as taxpayers pay for the errors of their caste, they must expect a ferocious backlash.
We are fortunate that the US has a new president enjoying a great reservoir of sympathy, and a clean-broom Congress. Other nations must limp on with carcass governments: Germany's paralysed Left-Right coalition, the burned-out relics of Japan's LDP, and Labour's death march in Britain. Some are taking precautions: Silvio Berlusconi is trying to emasculate Italy's parliament (with little protest) while the Kremlin has activated "anti-crisis" units to nip protest in the bud.
We are moving into Phase II of the Great Unwinding. It may be time to put away our texts of Keynes, Friedman, and Fisher, so useful for Phase 1, and start studying what happened to society when global unemployment went haywire in 1932.
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