What a day to have a birthday. With the world and its future darkening visibly around us, and crunch turning to munch, we’re all seemingly heading for lunch on a plate, not seated at the table.

However, amidst all that financial chaos there is some good news: Syntagma is three years old.

Three is a significant number in horse, dog and internet years. Horses get to run in the Derby, dogs are the equivalent of 21, and anything on the internet is a virtual centenarian.

When we started out 36 long months ago, this site was a pure technology and media play. It was also the cheerleader for the launch of new sites on a large sprinkling of topics. Now I write here only about politics, finance and technology, in that order of magnitude. You won’t need to ask why, discerning Reader.

Many of the old staff have moved on — those who remain have aged visibly, some even look like centenarians.

Enough of the past, it is another country as someone once said — The Shire, perhaps. If the future looks more like the Land of Mordor, I fancy we’ll glean something of value and interest from it, and certainly something to write about — whatever horrors it throws at us.

So what’s the prognosis for Syntagma’s fourth year of operations, bearing in mind it is a business as well as an online publication?

In the wider world, freight shipping is slowing at the same rate it did at the end of 1931. There are so many similarities popping up between now and the 1930s, it’s beginning to take on a distinct Tolkien shade of dark mist and distant pointy mountains.

Even Russia, with it’s massive half-trillion of cash reserves, is sliding into a downward spiral towards another bankruptcy and authoritarianism.

We ourselves on this sceptred Isle will not be spared a decade of pitiful growth, or none, as we purge the vast vaults of debt accumulated under the deceptively-stern gaze of Prudence in recent years.

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard puts it in today’s Telegraph, “The world stole prosperity from the future for year after year, with the full collusion of governments, regulators, and central banks. Now the future has arrived.”

Well, we are still here. And we will prevail until we come out the other side like foot soldiers returning from the trenches. In internet age, I calculate we’ll be around 300.

Something to celebrate, surely?

P.S. As a contrast with today, here’s Syntagma’s first birthday piece. Read here.

John Evans

Just a few weeks ago the world was wondering if we were about to be pitched into a deadly Black Hole created by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

Relax. The machine has broken down and will not be cranked up again until the spring.

Strange then that another Black Abyss stretches before us today in the shape of a virulent debt deflation of almost unimaginable ferocity.

Take these words by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in today’s UK Telegraph:

We face extreme danger. Unless there is immediate intervention on every front by all the major powers acting in concert, we risk a disintegration of global finance within days. Nobody will be spared, unless they own gold bars.

In case you think that smacks of hysteria, this is a man who has called this crisis correctly ever since the late summer of 2007. He adds:

“During the past week, we have tipped over the edge, into the middle of the abyss. Systemic collapse is in full train. … Central bankers still paralysed by a misplaced fear of inflation – whether in Europe, Britain, or the US – have become a public menace and should be held to severe account by our democracies. The imminent and massive danger is now self-feeding debt deflation.”

What this crisis shows is that world prosperity was built on a giant illusion: that there was real value in other people’s promises to pay at some future date, and that you could pass the parcel at a vast profit.

Time has run out and a bubble the size of an asteroid has landed and exploded in the centre of our civilization — the banking system.

The Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett agrees, “In my adult lifetime, I don’t think I’ve ever seen people as fearful.”

Evans-Pritchard is lacerating about the EU and its Central Bank. It offered no “cover” to the Fed when Ben Bernanke slashed rates to 2 percent. The ECB simply raised its rate to 4.25 percent into a steep downturn, making oil inflation even worse.

As a last resort, it seems, the American authorities will use Bernanke’s famous printing press “to expand the menu of assets that it buys.” In the worst case, that could lead to a massive run on the dollar by foreign creditors and no end of misery for us all. But it may be necessary nonetheless.

At home, I have absolutely no confidence in the British government under Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. They have been woefully slow to act, their policy to hide their heads under a pillow hoping it will all go away.

If Brown had even a small slice of a leader’s courage he would put together a massive package to recapitalize the British banking system; disown the “mark-to-market” accounting agreement, which forces banks into insolvency by estimating their assets on depressed valuations; take immediate control of interest rates by reducing them to 2 percent; begin to prepare for withdrawal from the useless European Union; and work closely with the Americans, who are, at the very least, fully aware of the immense dangers we face.

The Kraken is awake and bearing down on us fast. Over coming months and years we may wish that the Hadron Collider had swallowed us all up when it had the chance.

Update: The British Government has announced a variety of measures to recapitalize the banks and get the inter-bank lending markets working again. It amounts to a $900 billion bailout, eerily identical to the Paulson Plan for a country five times the size of Britain.

John Evans

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Hard times or better times?

Today, for some reason, I’ve been reviewing how I consume news and commentary, both on- and offline. It must be the persistent wind and rain outside.

This is not going to make a long article, so I’ll get straight to the point.

I live in England where, contrary to Robert Scoble, we have a superb selection of national broadsheet newspapers, plus a dubious pot of red-top tabloids that entertain us from time to time with their wild excesses — though none quite as bad as some in the U.S.

I find I tend to consume hard news — like “Obama wins primary”, “Brown reneges on solemn promise” — on TV rolling news programs, principally the BBC’s News 24. Never for more than 20 minutes, though, because nothing is more life dehancing than watching the same clips over and over — unless they’re about you, of course.

Tech news is best read online. Techmeme, TechCrunch (and the other Crunches) and Robert Scoble put the print press in the shade. It’s very much a case of deja vu if I glance at the technology pages in The Times or the Guardian. In fact I think they source a lot of their material from the tech blogosphere too.

Here at Syntagma Towers we only buy the print version of The Daily Mail because it loses a lot of its visual value online. It’s more of a magazine these days, so you need to have it in your hands for maximum impact.

I read the American press online, which means The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. It’s so much simpler than buying late print versions flown over.

I also consume the British broadsheets in pixel form. Unmissable commentary in large blocks of text does not require a paper version in an age of big screen monitors.

The Telegraph is the first port of call, with its brilliant array of journalists : American Janet Daley (who, annoyingly, is rarely wrong about anything) ; International Business Editor, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, whose commentary on the credit crunch is required reading — oh, and I knew some of his relatives in Oxford. Charles Moore can be relied upon to throw fresh light on any subject, and Jeff Randall is a one-stop-shop for untangling what’s going on in the business and political firmaments. Add Matthew d’Ancona’s take on politics and the paper really is de rigueur for anyone interested in the world we think we live in. Not forgetting Simon Heffer, of course. That’s quite a galaxy of stars.

The Times (London) ditto. Anatole Kaletsky’s macroeconomic pieces are perfectly read online, as are Matthew Parris’s musings on politics and everything that moves.

So, a newspaper nut like me only reads one paper in its native print version. What does that say about the future of print?

Keep the aspidistra flying folks.