That old pendulum is swinging again and at a speed that threatens disaster for banks and economies alike.

During the Thatcher decade (1980s) the politburo socialism of the 1970s was jettisoned all over the world — apart from in isolated outposts like Castro’s Cuba. Both the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union crashed to oblivion, and Mao’s China turned to its own version of capitalism.

That long swing to market dominance over centralized control has continued for nearly 30 years. Until now.

It’s about to go into reverse because of the vast mountains of debt built up in the system — an indebtedness that threatens to bring down the whole financial setup, investment and retail banks, and the “real economy” too.

Bank regulators are even now sharpening their swords ready to cut into the once-impenetrable jungle of bonus-led speculation and rampant hedonism that defines the financial markets, once the Rolls Royces of any respectable country.

Should we allow the pendulum — which more and more resembles the scythe of the Grim Reaper — to retrace its path back to the 1970s? Have we learned nothing?

Let’s just glance at the current situation in the markets. A spokeman for French bank Société Générale, itself a victim of the speculation culture, is deeply pessimistic, “We expect global equity prices to fall by up to 75pc from their peaks as a deep global economic downturn unfolds over the next few years.” A 50pc collapse in earnings is on the cards, made worse by an “Ice Age derating of equities”.

A 75pc fall in stocks matches Japan’s Lost Decade in the 1990s when they fell around 80pc.

The danger is that ultra-low rates will fuel another credit bubble which will put the real problem — huge debt levels — off for another turn of the screw, when it will surely be even worse.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the UK’s Telegraph believes, “The capitalist system is now so deformed by debt that it requires ever lower interest rates to keep going. It survives on perma-bubbles. Monetary rigour at this late stage would endanger democracy. How did we ever let matters reach this pass?”

The UK regulator — the Financial Services Agency (FSA), which failed dismally with Northern Rock, has just published a report on the affair which highlights the problems regulators have. The FSA simply lacked the up-to-the-minute expertise on the newest financial instruments of the people it was regulating. To make matters worse, it was grossly understaffed for the job it was asked to do by government.

Rather than going back to the Dark Ages of government control and draconian restrictions, it would be better to do a deal with the banking system to co-opt top bankers for a year to the regulators. They could be paid identical salaries and averaged bonus equivalents as the banks pay out. They would then return to their institutions to keep up with new developments.

This would be expensive and would probably cause outrage in the public sector, but it would be far cheaper and less demoralizing than turning the clock back to the bad old days of politburo socialism.

The depredations of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in America, following the Enron collapse, is a measure of how to overdo regulation. Let’s learn from the past in order to safeguard the future.

In the meantime the vast columns of red ink splashing across the economies of the world will unwind fitfully and very painfully for years. There is no alternative.

We need to hold our nerve and steady the pendulum.

It’s happening now in America and is due here in the UK and Europe by summer, if the usual time lags apply.

The recession / depression / crash is on its way like an unstoppable tsunami.

A tsunami is not a “tidal wave”. Waves break and retreat when they hit shallow waters or the shore. A tsunami trundles on for miles inshore powered by tremendous forces out in the deep ocean. No power on earth can stop it until its energy is spent.

Those who think we can stop a deep recession from happening by fiddling with interest rates or printing liquidity are looking at wave science not tsunamis. Now we can only watch and hope.

The signs of families cutting back their spending are everywhere here in Britain. Apart from the super-rich, ordinary folk are drawing in their horns as if they never existed. This mass retreat from the markets is beginning to have a cumulative effect which can only build to an inevitable crescendo.

The banks are barely functioning, except as deposit-takers. When they get our money they hoard it like the early Ebenezer Scrooge — the kind of man who creates depressions or shows us how to avoid them, depending on your point of view.

America is in deep trouble now, deserted even by the Sovereign Wealth Funds of the Orient, who just a few weeks ago seemed like saviours. Now they are pulling their cash out and retreating to the new economies of the East.

The “carry trade” to smaller Western economies, like Turkey, Iceland, Latvia, Estonia and others is falling apart, as will these countries in the coming months. Iceland may well be the first to crack, like some monstrous symptom of global warming tearing apart the ice sheets.

Those that are in the eurozone are being held together only by the common currency, the euro. But the fault-lines are beginning to show and it seems only a matter of time before the whole system snaps in a great twanging of over-stretched elastic. Beethoven would not recognize the new European Symphony about to be played. An Ode to Joy it isn’t.

If we look at all this from a Scroogian perspective though, it’s a kind of deep-cleanse that the world’s febrile financial sectors need — and this is certainly a problem of their making. This tsunami began in the boardrooms of banks and retail lenders, not in the real economy where most of us work — although our greed doubtless helped.

As America contracts, like a crab sensing danger, we can only await the storms to come. And they are the least of it. The unstoppable tsunami is the real enemy.

I spent some of the longish Easter break thinking about Dark Matter — as you do.

The reason is, I have a theory about all this. But before you duck for cover, let me explain.

Physicists claim that the universe punches above its weight. It behaves as if it were much heavier than it appears to be. To make allowances for this the boffins describe the chunk they can’t see as “Dark Matter”. It’s a bit like calling a transcendant intelligence “God” — but don’t tell them that.

Of course, this begs the question of how they weighed the universe in the first place. Does a weighing machine exist hidden away in the basement of the Physics department at some university? It would have to be bigger than the universe itself, of course, and it couldn’t weigh itself. Presumably the scales would have to be designated Dark Matter.

Anyway, they obviously think they’re on to something here.

Not quite. I remember an ancient text by the Buddha in which he says that only one-quarter of the universe is made known to us, the rest is hidden. Hmm, sound like Dark Matter to me. Sorry lads.

Now — are you still with me? — if we remove the word “Dark” from the equation we’re left with “Matter”. Did the Buddha think of the remaining three-parts as matter? What if it were software of some kind?

Say you were trying to show someone on a blog how to code a particular action — putting up a picture, for example. Every time you post the code the software converts it, usually into a blank space with a symbol or two dangling from it. That’s because you wouldn’t have fully completed the code. If you had, your student at the other end would get a picture instead of an explanation.

Hold that image in your head as we move on.

Quantum physicists say that if you have twin particles — presumably electrons — and you change one of them, the other changes too … wait for it … even if it’s on the other side of the universe!

How do they know that? They’re magicians, of course. Seriously. Their latest theory is called “M Theory”, the “m” standing for Magic and Mystery. I’m not making this up.

Anyway, you see where I’m going with all this.

Let’s assume Dark Matter is software or its mystical equivalent. Every time you wish for something, the “software” tries to convert it into reality. Remember the time you wanted something very badly : “Please land me a big job and a mansion in the country. I promise I’ll be good from now on.”? Fat chance.

Actually, it’s said you often get a rough approximation of what you ask for. That’s because, like the code, you won’t have framed it specifically enough, and you may even have changed your mind halfway through the process. Presumably that explains why camels often appear instead of horses.

Einstein mentioned the fact in his Relativity Theory that human observers affect the processes they’re observing. In other words they often see what they want to see. Take the human genome. These genes can only be seen by an electron microscope, which only shows what it’s been programmed to show. So, if we are set on finding “genes” we’ll find genes — and they will look like some fantasy picture by a splendid artist — a double helix, let’s say.

Physicists always look for complexity, that’s the way they’re made. So we have one dizzying set of particles after another, like the quark, which used to be soft cheese and is now a fundamental building block of the universe. The moon could be made of green cheese after all, if we want it enough.

Once — like Einstein and the Quantum chappies — you start breaking down matter, the whole of science reveals itself to be a sham. I’m not talking about technology which probably works on the “cosmic ordering” principle. Man dreams about flying like a bird, and decades later the Tiger Moth appears, later still the Jumbo jet. Not quite what we had in mind, but close. Teleology lives!

Back full circle and someone now claims to have found Dark Matter, neatly tidied away in some unused corner of the cosmos. It had to be. The mathematical model required it.

Or could it be the universe gave us what we wanted? The only question is, what on earth will we do with it?

Be careful what you wish for — you may get it.

As it’s Good Friday we spent the morning discussing sages — as you do. The topic arose from the death of Arthur C. Clarke (pictured), the science fiction author and inventor of synchronous-orbiting satellites.

I once partly collaborated with him on a book project I was writing for BT. He kindly gave me full access to his library and archives in Taunton, the family home town. He always struck me as a sagelike character interested in shaping a better future from a troublesome present and even worse past. Maybe that’s a good definition of a sage.

But are there any other sages left, especially in the online world which most of our readers inhabit?

A number of living sages sprang to mind. For example, Warren Buffett, the Sage of Omaha, whose advice on investment must be worth a bob or two.

Bill Gates? I think so. He’s veered far from his specialism during his long career and always has views on the shape of things to come. As indeed has Steve Jobs of Apple.

But are they too self-interested to be real sages? Shouldn’t sagacity float free of any self-partiality? That doesn’t leave many to choose from, does it?

I think we should accept the above three figures as sages, with minor reservations. Although they are never going to be Mahatma Gandhis — money just gets in the way somehow.

So who then is The Sage of the Blogosphere?

Dave Winer pops up from beneath the parapet. He writes long and often at Scripting News. If you eliminate the endless links — none has ever come Syntagma’s way, incidentally, but we’re above all that — his longer pieces tend to have a careful, sagelike quality about them.

His problem is that he’s a bit too liberal (in the UK read “left-wing”). A sage should surely not support a political party. Their manifestos are written for idiots by half-baked zealots.

Does zealotry crush sagacity? I think so.

Who else? There are lots of authors in the tech blogosphere who write long articles of a philosophical and speculative nature — Jeff Jarvis, anyone? And I can think of a dozen more. John Battelle, Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis …

And how about Tim Berners-Lee who “invented” the Worldwide Web, the internet as we know it. He also writes persuasively about its future as the Semantic Web — Web 3.0 — and was recently given the Order of Merit by the Queen, one of the highest honours in the land.

However, sages should stand out more than just being brilliant at what they do — shouldn’t they?

Questions, questions.

In the political blogosphere Andrew Sullivan writes deeply and never uninterestingly about matters of the day. Last week was a departure when he covered the future of video blogging. But is he a sage? Would he want to be?

Maybe the internet is not the right medium for sages of the old school. Are there sages of the new school?

Perhaps we don’t recognize them yet. Only hindsight will make them stand out from the pack. After all, Arthur C. Clarke was not regarded as a sage when he wrote wildly about satellites in the 1940’s magazine Wireless World. It was only later when small bits of technology were dumped at 22,000 miles above the planet that his foresight was spotted.

I think I’d better leave the question open : who is The Sage of the Blogosphere?

To paraphrase that undoubted sage, Albert Einstein, “Not everyone that counts can be counted, and not everyone that can be counted counts”.

Update : After much thought on this question, I’ve decided that my candidate for The Sage of the Blogosphere is Robert X. Cringely.