Syntagma never says “I told you so”. It’s an irritating phrase that adds nothing to a debate. It’s also a pyrrhic victory when the bad times roll.

We’re talking about the American economy, of course — now in recession, as we’ve been predicting for months — and the British and European financial positions, which are trailing some way behind the U.S., but about to implode too.

We’ve been on the case since last June when the ominous tag “credit crunch” started to be bandied about in response to falling American house prices.

As online publishers we are partially protected from the ravages faced by bricks and mortar operations. Even so, Google responded to the same data last year by dumping lots of small publishers using its AdWords/AdSense programs and its range of offshoot partnerships.

ZDNet Editor in Chief Larry Dignan believes that “the dip in Google’s paid clicks was intentional, part of a strategic plan designed to deliver better, more-precisely targeted ads” and tends “to reflect macroeconomic conditions” — an acknowledgment that suggests Google isn’t recession-proof.

The knock-on effects lowered the earning power of a whole raft of mid-sized publishers who operate below the glass ceiling of scalability needed to challenge the giant press barons of the print media.

Given the power of this pincer movement, how should internet marketers and publishers ride out the troubles ahead, which may even include another dotcom crash?

Here at Syntagma we are developing two new business models which don’t depend exclusively on Google rankings and big investment in assets. We have also moved to conserve cash, now the most sought after commodity in global financial markets. Forget equities, bonds and angel lending. Asset-backing is truly out of fashion. Only cash and gold will do during the next two to five years, or maybe even longer than that. Japan took more than a decade to haul itself out of its banking crisis and the profound deflation of the 1990s.

I really don’t see how mid-sized businesses, with heavy debt, and/or lots of equity in the hands of VCs, can get through this otherwise.

The Fed’s dramatic easing of monetary policy, which still has some way to go, is barely making an impact, although the usual lags apply. In the 1990s, Japan found that zero, even negative, interest rates could not persuade its reluctant public to splash out in the shops. Longer term rates in the U.S. are already close to zero.

Ben Bernanke is apparently studying the Japanese experience of zero rates right now. Surely a sign of what’s to come.

The game now appears to be out of the hands of the authorities whatever they decide to do. Bernanke deserves credit for at least trying. His next move will surely be to throw the kitchen sink at the problem and let the Devil take the hindmost. This is no time for musings on “moral hazard”, the hazard is not inflation but deflation and slump. Massive U.S. Government loans to individual defaulters can’t be ruled out and may be just around the corner.

Compare that to the lethargic approach of the Bank of England and the European Central Bank. Still holding rates at 5.25 percent and 4 percent respectively, although the BoE has little room to manoeuvre thanks to Gordon Brown’s obsession with public-sector spending.

The first casualties could be some major institutions in America and monetary union in Europe, where the euro currency is looking very vulnerable. At least Brown got that right.

Syntagma predicts we are going to be amazed by developments in the not too distant future. The world may look a very different place when we come out of this, and it won’t necessarily be all bad news. Bubbles have to burst. Nature demands it. And the end of the eurozone would be a big plus for European freedom.

Nearly a year ago I wrote a post called These are the good times. They were and still are, uncomfortable though the ride may be.

Banks are rarely in the news as much as they are now. There are yet more writedowns from the giants of banking in their end of year reports.

Will that be the end of it? Probably not, but at least a fightback is underway by the bulls, while the bears seem to be temporarily in retreat.

With Ben Bernanke last week promising to cut rates with a scythe instead of the usual nail scissors, America will avoid a real slump and the world will move on.

Anatole Kaletsky in his Economic View column in the Times (London) thinks the U.S. may well avoid a serious recession (two quarters of negative growth) and prognosticates as follows for Britain and Europe :

By the second half of 2008, however, the euro will take over from the pound as the pariah of the global currency markets, since the eurozone will ultimately suffer more than Britain from the slowdown in the global economy because the European Central Bank will resist making the inevitable interest-rate cuts. This intransigence by the ECB will cause serious economic and political disruptions in Europe – and could even raise questions about the euro’s survival as a reserve currency in the long term.

The landscape will be changed though. The behaviour of the banks in recent years has been beyond any pale we might wish to contemplate in a nightmare, but then that’s not exactly new. Who said this, for example? :

“I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a grand scale.”

That was Thomas Jefferson in 1816.

Plus ca change …

Update : Citigroup has just posted a near $20billion writeoff for Q4 2007. These are spectacular numbers which highlight the immense financial transfer from the West to the Far East that’s now underway thanks to the greed and stupidity of our bankers.

Before you switch off, I don’t mean climate change. That’s a doddle since we have little control over it, despite what the doomsters think. Nor am I writing about nuclear war, surely a distant memory now.

I mean the alarming slide into a 1930s style worldwide Depression.

I’ve written a few times in Syntagma about the constraints of running a business in England, where the pound sterling is the currency, while our income is designated and paid in US dollars. Now one of the world’s major companies, Airbus — which is partly owned by the French state — has announced that its business model is shot through and broken.

Their problem is that the dollar has fallen even more against the euro than the pound. A euro is now worth $1.50. A few years ago there was jubilation when the euro achieved parity with the dollar. Eat your hearts out Eurocrats!

Airbus sells more airliners around the world than Boeing, but since aircraft prices are designated in dollars, they get paid one third less than Boeing compared with the period of parity. In a tight-margin international business that’s fatal. Many other European companies are feeling the pinch too — business confidence has all but collapsed in Germany, and the French are going through one of their periodic episodes of industrial unrest, with workers marching in the streets against Government diktat.

The driving mechanism behind all this is the massive US trade deficit. The Treasury is content to see a steady drop in the dollar as a correction to this deficit. Other countries see it as “beggar my neighbor”.

But more ominous forces are gathering now which will really put pressure on the world’s financial system. The new economies of China, Brazil and India are starting to move their large trade surpluses out of dollar assets into euro assets. The same is happening with the petrodollar states in the Gulf. Apart from setting up a future Wall Street crash, it’s also putting great strains on the eurozone, which is a ragbag club of nations speaking different languages and with very different economies.

The strain is such that Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France, is talking about limiting capital flows into the eurozone. The EU Commission has said this is possible because of a little known clause in an annexe to a policy document dating back to 2003. Europe always reverts to political will over the rule of law.

Since this decision could be taken by majority voting of finance ministers, Britain could be outvoted here. The result of a cap on capital inflows would be devastating to London, which is the world’s leading financial centre. In such circumstances Britain would have no choice but to withdraw from the European Union.

Stateside, the sub-prime mortgage fiasco is feeding into the wider situation and genuine fears of a 1929 crash and 1930s type depression are rife among those who know about these things.

Will it happen? Luckily for Americans, “cometh the hour, cometh the man”. Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, has spent his life studying the causes of the 1930s Depression, so is unlikely to allow the same mistakes to be made. He can also call on the advice of wily old Alan Greenspan, now retired, whose new book, The Age of Turbulence should be required reading for anyone interested in the global economy in the 21st century.

Syntagma’s guess is that Western economies are resilient and flexible enough to withstand the shocks that are coming without withering on the vine. The joker in the pack, though, is the eurozone, which lacks the strength of the Common Law countries in dealing with the rest of the world. There’s even wild talk in Brussels about a Fortress Europe, with the euro countries only trading with themselves behind massive tariff walls. Sound familiar? It’s Politburo time again in the Chancelleries of Europe.

I believe the euro currency will collapse within five years. Britain will withdraw from the EU to preserve its international trading position, and America will take a severe knock but will recover strongly to regain its former position.

As for the emerging “superpowers”, they face a collapse in their export trade from which they will struggle to recover — think Japan in the 1990s and the meltdown of the Tiger economies of the Far East.

There’s a lot of water to flow under this bridge yet. It’s a greater immediate threat than climate change, so let’s ease back on all the noise about carbon footprints, offsets and trading.

There’s Armageddon to deal with first.