What is Emily Maitlis on?

Emily Maitlis and Nick Owen on the BBC News Channel

The Newsnight presenter is usually somber and on the ball during her late night appearances in Jeremy Paxman’s chair. But catch her after lunch on the BBC’s News Channel and she giggles like a schoolgirl, often for no apparent reason.

I’m not complaining, it’s good to have a bit of life injected into this often funereal blanket of news.

But what is she on? Either the BBC canteen serves a good wine at lunch, or … she’s very ticklish.

Lots of chatter about “one-term Tories” last week. This golden Labour scenario sounds like it was invented by someone with a vested interest in the Labour leadership and hopes to avoid a generational shift.

Jack Straw or Peter Mandelson, perhaps?

It presupposes that David Cameron gets bogged down in the first years of his premiership and becomes so unpopular that the country turns back to Labour with relief in the subsequent election. Margaret Thatcher’s first period in office is cited. It was fraught with recessionary woes and nearly collapsed but for the Falklands War.

The difference now is that the country gives ownership of the nation’s economic plight to Gordon Brown and Labour. They also know that Brown’s frantic attempts to fix it have failed, with more failure to come.

However bad it gets in the next Parliament, Labour’s wishful thinking will not be granted. Disaster on this scale requires a generation to forget.

With careful stewardship, the Conservatives can count on three periods in office at least. They should develop a To-Do list that will last them for three Parliaments. It will take that long.

The first of March is the beginning of my Spring Offensive. This is when I throw off the torpors of winter through a programme of rigorous diet and excercise.

Last year the American tech blogosphere was heavy with “fatblogging” — a form of ritual torture which not only hammers the body but also gets the sufferer to write about it in detail for the consumption of fellow addicts and bemused onlookers.

Naturally, I’ll not be going down that road in 2009.

Like many another, I put on a few pounds during the months of dark nights and midwinter festivities. This year I have one stone to lose by the end of March. It may not seem much, but that’s quite a lot of weight.

One stone — or 14 pounds — is the equivalent of five copies of The Sunday Times. Next time you’re in a newsagent’s on a Sunday pick them up and feel how much added padding that represents. You’ll be shocked.

So I hope to shed one Sunday Times and a magazine section each week through March. No doubt some weeks I’ll only manage a Mail on Sunday, and may even be heard cursing, “Damn, I’ve put on a News of the World in seven days!”

So exercise has to be part of the plan too. My aim is to similate the fitness of a Mountain Man, who is said to walk up mountains (hills, really) at the same rate as he walks down — no mean feat, and tough on the quadriceps.

As it takes six weeks to reach the maximum fitness you can attain without professional training, I usually start this part of the programme in mid-February.

The diet begins tomorrow the 2nd of March, on the principle that it shows an excessively eager nature to start too soon.

The State education system in Britain just gets worse and worse. Hyperactive jobsworths are forever coming up with new wheezes that dazzle in the headlines for an hour but have no merit in practice.

The entire structure is probably beyond repair after 12 years of scorched earth policies for everything that promotes a well-stocked mind and an understanding of the principles that stand behind ideas and formulations.

The Conservatives have yet to jettison some of Labour’s most pernicious obsessions, like the refusal to allow selection in academic subjects. I have high hopes they will do so in office.

But what should the basic education system provide?

It should give students the ability to position themselves in time and space, with historical narrative as the time axis, and geography as the space axis. Both subjects have been severely downgraded in primary and secondary schooling.

The curriculum should also be shorn of soft “social” subjects better learnt at home or through experience. All attempts at social engineering should be strictly outlawed.

Psychobabble has become a wordy substitute for a true understanding of human nature, which is not a machine. Allied to that, PC (political so-called correctness) has assumed fascist proportions in attempts to control the thoughts of the population. Schools lead the way as mind-cleansing centres of anything with which the government disagrees.

Why do they do that? Because “they” — and we know who they are — want us all to be just like them.

Sorry, we don’t.

A lost generation of schoolchildren from the Labour years will probably never be redeemed and will haunt the future as they carry the mouldy seed of mediocrity forward.

The Conservatives can make a start on creating a new wave of educated young people with a better grasp of the fundamentals and of more use to the 21st-century world.

If you’re looking for a good read on the wild and woolly side, there’s no better publication to start with than The Hedge Fund Journal — there had to be one, didn’t there?

I’m always fascinated at how every niche market has its journal and coterie of followers, often existing in another dimension from the rest of us.

So the Asset Management class, which has produced its own stars, like Hugh Hendry of Eclectica — the Mick Jagger of short (and long) selling — has a journal to keep its members in touch.

To most people hedge funds are so exotic they belong on another planet. They are run by a tribe of self-confessed pirates, some with a single ship, others with an entire fleet.

Hugh Hendry has become a media star, sought after by the likes of Jeff Randall on Sky, and Evan Davis on the BBC. His good humour and Blarney-stoned eloquence, with an irresistible touch of the unexpected, puts him in the top bracket of media performers from the much-depleted ranks of the hedgies.

Will they survive the depression? Just as the world needs hyenas and vultures to clear up carrion, and bacteria to consume dead and dying bodies, I suspect they will.

You have to see it in the round.

Is the eurozone about to break up? Don’t rule it out.

There’s a lot of conflicting talk around at the moment. The Germans are adamantly opposed to taking on liability for the debts of the less disciplined members — the PIIGS: Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain; Emerald Club Med, one might say.

Yet the German Finance Minister has not ruled out a rescue in the last resort. German voters might not take kindly to it though, and there are elections in September.

Now the European Investment Bank (EIB) is being touted as the issuer of new Euro bonds to shore up these profligate countries. The unbending Maastricht Treaty rules this area, of course, but a little matter of law never stopped the Commission bending the rules in the past. The European Stability Pact was a classic example.

Whatever happens next will prove that the present one-size-fits-all system can never survive without either much more beef behind it, or a smaller membership.

At the end of this depression, I expect the eurozone will look very different and carry much less weight in the world.

Quote of the Week

“England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen.” George Orwell

John Evans

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As a self-appointed member of that exotic species named “internet entrepreneurs”, I was interested in Fraser Nelson’s article in the current issue of The Spectator.

The summary of the piece states: “… the Conservatives are taking their cue from the West Coast of America: the land of Google, Stanford University and venture capital. They want to rebuild Britain in California’s image: dynamic, high-tech, green and ‘family-friendly’.”

That is a good idea … up to a point.

California has its exhilarating high points for sure. It also embraces deep pits of madness. As a melting-pot State with many right-on East Coast emigres, plus millions of Hispanics up from the South, mostly illegal, it lacks the sense of cohesion Britain once had, and still does in some parts of the country. It’s home as well to ancient Baby Boomer clans and sects that hanker after the long-gone era of “flower power”. It’s also on the brink of bankruptcy.

California has an annual income roughly the same as the UK’s. Recently it was said to be overtaking Britain and would soon be the fourth largest world economy. We won’t know if that’s really true until the dust settles from the current depression.

On this side of the duck pond, we tend to see only two aspects of the State: Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Both conjure up images of starlets on roller skates, prettily propelling themselves along wide pavements against a background of endless sun, sea and sand to the sound of the ululating Beach Boys.

We blank out the forest fires, the frequent earthquakes, the smogs, boot to bumper car jams, crime, and the cute chaos of the place. It’s a young person’s environment, maddeningly obtuse about lots of things, always eager to jump on any passing whimsy that offers a new thrill.

Incubator of the future, yes, but also progenitor of a million tried and rejected poppycock schemes. The Brits who wash up there are usually attention seekers, like actors, singers and graduates of Performing Arts schools.

California is also hard work. Michael Arrington, who built up TechCrunch from nothing, has had a series of health problems from overwork, including exhaustion, nervous and heart complaints. He recently received serious death threats and was spat on in a public place, requiring a month off work.

TechCrunch.com is a blog-based content network that evaluates startup enterprises and their products. It’s no place for the fainthearted apparently.

Duncan Riley, who originated The Blog Herald from a quiet corner of Western Australia, graduated to TechCrunch and spent some time in the Valley. His observations on the crazy greed of the place, its supercharged way of life and general attrition against human health and sanity, contributed to my own decision not to move there at the height of the boom.

And yet the lessons of the Valley and of the Californian and Seattle-based tech scenes can be learnt and imported by a new Tory administration.

Britain needs to manufacture more, especially high tech equipment and derivatives. Silicon Valley specializes largely in internet-based software and services, but it doesn’t make the hardware. The metal and plastic bits are cheaper to produce and assemble in the Far East, and that will remain so in the future.

The operating software, which the Valley does so well, is deferred design and therefore part of the manufacturing process. No-one will buy a generalist box of tricks with no room for applications.

There is also a third level in the making of computer technology, that of application writing — the creative bit. The operating software contains a series of APIs (application programming interfaces) which allow outside creators (programmers) to add products and services to the basic design.

Increasingly, these services are being dangled from “the cloud”, a magical place in cyberspace where software applications and APIs reside for public use. Software on hard drives is going rapidly out of fashion at the punchy end of the market.

The British happen to be very good at these secondary and tertiary levels of the manufacturing process. One thing holds them back.

The national curriculum and the educational establishment relentlessly discriminate against “abstract thinking”, the basic skill for succeeding in these areas. Universities are encouraged to subvert their course lists in favour of cottonwool subjects like media studies and sports management.

In Britain, you can select students for State schooling only in areas of music, sport, and other physical and dexterity arts. You can’t select for mathematics or disciplines which require abstract thinking, like philosophy, theoretical physics or logic.

Stupidly and destructively, the Labour party has created all manner of taboos against it, raising any proposer of academic selection almost to criminal status. So far, the Conservatives have gone along with this for a quiet life. They fear the demonizing power of the left, which is far nastier than they are.

That amounts to national suicide, especially for a country that was, within living memory, responsible for 55 percent of the world’s primary inventions and discoveries.

If George Osborne wants to mimic West Coast Silicon Valley or Seattle, let him sort out that problem first. Britain needs to train its own software engineers, not import them from India and the Far East.

Globalization will take a long time to recover from its recent catastrophic fall from grace. We need to look carefully at ourselves and incubate the future here at home. Empire building abroad can wait … for now.

John Evans

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The disturbing story of the very young Australian boy feeding small zoo animals to larger ones, raises all kinds of questions and parallels.

In the past year more than 20 teenagers have hanged themselves in the area around the small borough of Bridgend in South Wales, UK. Why they did it remains unanswered and is baffling parents, police, experts and the authorities.

In America the phenomenon of high school kids shooting up their campuses, then turning the guns on themselves, probably comes from the same root cause.

The police say they were not all members of any web-based suicide cult, although a few of them may have used the chatrooms. They didn’t all know each other either, and didn’t constitute a group or gang. So what is happening here?

Bridgend is a rather nice area, surrounded by glorious countryside, including the Vale of Ogmore and Merthyr Mawr, a wild place of sand dunes and beaches. It’s also near to the upmarket Vale of Glamorgan, a wealthy patch of rolling, green hills and country pubs. There are many worse places to live.

They did all have one thing in common though. Like all modern teenagers they were immersed in social networking sites — Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and some with the virtual world of Second Life.

Their inner space was formed by the anarchistic conversations of mainly unknown “friends” made on these addictive sites. No settled discourse this, but a 24/7 babble of wildly differing opinions, rants and life objectives, generously sprinkled with bizarre fantasies incapable of fulfilment in the real world.

And there’s the crunch — “the real world”. It really is a second life on these sites, bearing little resemblance to the day to day concerns of older people. That, of course, is their attraction.

The sites’ main competitor is “the real world”, that space of dismal state schooling; urgent demands on climate change of which we are ingenuously presented as the main cause; the breakdown of our ethical system and its replacement with social Marxism (political correctness and obsessive equality) and the bureaucratic autism of the governing class.

The world they look out on is one of cynical politicians on the make, advertisements that make them crave objects they know they don’t really need, and an adult generation that has allowed chaos to reign. The idealism of youth is quickly spent.

Add to all that, mass immigration and the introduction of cruel medieval practices, gang culture, knife crime and drug-based gun law, and the Britain they live in no longer has the moral or physical authority to demand their loyalty.

Teenagers today like nothing better than to “get wrecked” — hopelessly drunk — most nights of the week. Without boundaries to make sense of their lives, or any compelling lodestar to guide them, modern youth sinks into the apparent benign world of social networking.

The outer world gives them nothing but information-overload characterized by countless pressure groups competing for their attention with contradictory messages and injunctions. Good parents get drowned out, as do decent teachers.

Even the government is now just one voice among many, chopping and changing its empty slogans on a daily basis. Thought anarchy rules the lives of young people, an unpleasant environment for mental development to take place.

So, social networking they go. The problem is, it has a very thin actuality. Quickly they discover it hasn’t the substance to satisfy their need for experience and the challenges that promote growth of character and individuality. They are trapped in a no-man’s land between a wafer-thin second life and an unbearable jungle of squabbling claim and counter-claim in the world itself. No wonder many are taking their own lives.

Social networks can be dangerous places to be if you are immature and seeking experiences that should come from life itself.

John Evans

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

So far during this Crisis we’ve been discussing the crashing of big banks and financial institutions.

Today, the collapse of flatpack furniture giant MFI in the UK illustrates that the rot has set in on Main Street too. This has a long way to go yet.

But what about startups? These are small businesses with embryo staffing arrangements, usually depending on borrowed, credit card or venture capital funds to pay the bills.

Web 2.0 star and now a venture capitalist himself, Jason Calacanis, writing in Jason’s List — an email list for bright business folk — believes that up to 80 percent of them are on the point of going bust:

It’s my believe that the economic downturn will be much worse than it is today, and that 50-80 percent of the venture-backed startups currently operating will shut down or go on life-support (i.e. 3-4 folks working on them) within the next 18 months. Make a list of every Web 2.0 startup to raise an A or B round and cross 80 percent of them off the list, because they will not make it to their next round of funding or profitability.

I know many such startups personally, particularly tech and internet businesses, and this assessment is devastating. It’s also nothing but the truth in all its stark outline.

Around six months ago, we predicted here that another dotcom bust could not be ruled out. It can’t, but there’s always hope before it happens that some features peculiar to tech startups will not be in the direct path of the storm.

The first thing to note is that the internet is a much maturer place to do business now. Many more people depend on it than back then. It’s also stuffed full of very big players indeed, companies that will ride out the crash on a large cushion of cash — Microsoft and Google, for example.

It’s the overextended startups that will splutter to a halt, fall into mothball mode, or their owners will simply walk away and do something else.

The dotcom collapse earlier in the decade had the effect of destroying the paradigm it was built on: that internet businesses didn’t need to make any money at all, just puff themselves up for an IPO on the stock market which would make the founders very rich.

It was a classic bubble that burst with an inevitability that took believers by surprise, but never fooled more experienced observers.

The problem was that entry costs, even then, were very low compared with similar bricks-and-mortar operations. The potential was obvious, but people simply went mad with the hubris of it all.

The current bursting bubble in house prices — one of the biggest asset classes out there — is apparently similar but much more infectious in that it penetrates to the very core of the financial system and affects everyone, not just a few thousand geeks who thought they had reinvented the world.

If you were involved with the online world at the start of the century you’ll know how it felt to go under with a bang. It must feel eerily similar now.

Small-to-medium businesses with no debt, some cash reserves and crucially no need for further rounds of funding — like Syntagma Media — will survive, if they play their cards right. The danger is that their server companies won’t and they find themselves suddenly cut off.

This Crisis will affect everyone in different ways. It would be a prudent move to assess any business’s configuration to determine its weak points. That could save their skin.

Another week, another blog network wraps itself up. This time it’s the business network, Know More Media, which was particularly hard hit by Google’s ranking penalties.

Like BlogNation, a UK-based outfit, they simply ran out of money. I can think of many others that suffered the same fate, but will spare you the litany.

Even the few networks that professionalized themselves by raising VC funding and bringing in experienced managers, are finding the going tough right now. Earlier predictions of another dotcom bust are not off the table yet.

I’ve written many pieces here over the past three years on the choices faced by network owners and the chances of success. Most warned of this present crisis. As a result, Syntagma was ahead of the pack in diversifying into specialist information products on subscription terms. We have not yet felt the full force of the U.S. recession-in-progress.

The coming steep downturn in the UK will have minimum effect on us, except if the pound sterling falls relative to the dollar, in which case we will see our income rise on a windfall.

In America, the startup industry is losing momentum fast, although there’s no shortage of brave souls willing to chance more than their arms.

So, what’s to be done if you have invested heavily in an internet business, whether content or blogging-based or not?

The answer is to spot the second bounce of the ball.

As the economies eventually begin to turn around and a slow recovery takes place, most people will be looking out for “little green shoots” to signify a return to economic growth. In the early 1990s those shoots were a long time coming, and when they did, they grew slowly like hardwood trees, not the swift pines we were hoping for. I suspect the little shoots will keep us waiting even longer this time.

Green shoots may be interesting, but watching for the second bounce of the ball is usually more profitable. If the first bounce online for many of us was mass publishing technologies, what could the second be?

Providing content on your own platform as both writer and publisher makes sense because it cuts costs. Hiring other writers to do it for you made sense three years ago, but with advertisers shunning small-to-medium operations it’s probably easier to flip burgers.

Now we need a second bounce to reflate the whole business of working successfully online.

Forget social media. Maggie Jackson’s book Distracted: The Erosion Of Attention And The Coming Dark Age highlights the price we pay — including actual brain damage — for standard multi-tasking and trying to keep abreast of the information space.

As in my own book on the subject, Mediate Yourself, this is now becoming a common theme whose time is about to come. Finding ways not just of sifting and processing information but relating it to people’s essential requirements is a major path forward. Limiting individuals’ needs to interact with screens is probably more relevant still.

Simplifying the lives of knowledge workers is the big leap forward that will take us to the next level.

So far technology and software have complicated human life immeasurably. The constant pressure to upgrade and learn new tricks is mind-mashingly painful for most people — hence the brain damage.

The truth is, there may be no single second bounce this time, but a series of mini-bounces, with no one golden goose presenting itself for carving.

At Syntagma, we have our eyes on a variety of possibilities. To use a rugby term, all it needs is for someone to pick up a ball and run with it. As I write, there are not many runners out there.

Oh well, I’ll just have to do it myself, I suppose.

“It’s with a heavy heart, and much consideration, that today I would like to announce my retirement from blogging.”
Jason McCabe Calacanis

Hold the front page? Well, yes, maybe — at least of the Silicon Alley Reporter, the U.S. trade magazine he founded.

Jason Calacanis is more widely known as the man who sold a network of blogs for around $30m to AOL a few years back. He is one of Web 2.0’s highest flyers in the sense that he turned big thoughts into big bucks. He now runs his own hand-rolled search engine, Mahalo.

His resignation “post” (as purists still call them) is worthy of Victorian melodrama, leading to charges of link-baiting — a common way of driving traffic to blogs. Naturally, he denies this, claiming never to have soiled his hands with such practices. Perish the thought.

He will, he says, replace his blogging activities with a private email list comprising roughly 1000 subscribers, all drawn from a group he calls “insiders”. These are intelligent, tech and business types of the kind most often found in Silicon Valley, California. So if you’re an Albanian circus performer with limited English, don’t bother to apply.

Why this move, and why now? Obvious answers include:

1. blogging has had its day.
2. attention spans are getting shorter, hence Twitter.
3. good bloggers often work as hard as journalists for little pay.
4. blogging has failed to build a reputation for quality.
5. spam comments have brought the system to its knees.
6. blog comments have let in demons from the outer darkness.

And there are many more reasons than those.

For good writers with something original to say, blogging has become a downward-leveller, rather than an enabler, as originally intended by weblog pioneers like Dave Winer. If you are a serious blogger, most readers will assume your opinions are prejudices, and ranting your principal method of communication. Otherwise, why don’t you write for The Guardian or Scientific American?

Commenters will lead you to believe the worst of the human race, which is why the traffic lights at the top of this site read “Comments OFF, Email ON.” Signs like this are becoming more prevalent around the “blogosphere” as people start to audit their return on capital from blogging.

The email list system is more like a private forum in which selected subscribers discuss topics in a “thread,” in this case the leader of the group’s weekly email. As a method of publishing to a coterie of like-minded individuals who are able to develop the arguments and refine them in a civilized fashion, the list has much to commend it. It’s also very cheap — no paper, printing and postage costs, or time-overhead batting away the daft, stupid, nasty and positively evil intruders.

For an author writing a nonfiction book with closely-argued chapters, it would be an excellent way of fact-checking the material and the logic of its presentation bit by bit, without having to submit it to academic specialists for verification before publishing.

In Jason Calacanis’s case, I would suspect he just wants to express himself in writing without all the hassle from trolls and oddballs.

In the end, the wisdom of crowds is no such thing because the most reckless, outspoken elements inevitably rise to leadership positions, drowning out more measured voices.

Meritocracy — the spirit of excellence, with decisions taken at points of maximum competence — always needs nurturing in cell-like establishments.

Let’s face it, the world is too big for any one individual to make much of an impact without vast wealth or political power. The blogosphere has become so enormous, comprised of multitudes of tiny, discrete pieces that it takes on the laws of quantum physics rather than the world of direct contact with our peers that humans crave.

There’s no worse tragedy than to have communicated widely for years only to discover that the throng out there still doesn’t know what you’ve been talking about.

There are some things that happen to other people, but never happen to you, right?

For example, identity fraud, credit card cloning and thieving of personal data.

Well, it happened to me today. While making a simple online transaction with a major UK retailer, one of my personal cards was refused three times.

When I rang the card issuer I was told that an outfit called Usenet was trying to obtain a payment. They knew the name, so blocked the card immediately. No money was lost to either side.

But it just shows you how easily your identity and financial infrastructure can be compromised by clever hacks and villains.

The only loss to me is having to wait a week for a new card to arrive.

Just another level of inconvenience to add to the new age of anxiety.

Gold rushes come and go in the world’s innovation capital, California, but when they go … they really go.

We’re hearing that the City of Vallejo has filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, apparently a first for a municipality. Half Moon Bay, home to a few internet big shots, may well be next. According to John Moorlach, Orange County board chief, “This is the tip of the iceberg: everybody is going to line up for Chapter 9 in California.”

What can it mean to people on the ground when their city goes belly up? What of their assets, houses etcetera? It will be interesting to watch this pan out.

According to Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers American house prices are likely to fall 25pc from peak to trough. With between 10m and 12m households in negative equity already, there’s still a way to go.

Shares across the developed world are set for big falls too. Albert Edward Société Générale’s global strategist says, “Nowhere and nothing will be immune. We are on the cusp of an equity meltdown that will slash and shred portfolios. We see a global recession unfolding. Liquidity will drain away and crush the twin emerging market and commodity bubbles. The recent hope that ‘the worst might be over’ is truly staggering. Profits are disintegrating.”

Ambrose Evans Pritchard of the Telegraph (UK) — ever the Cassandra — says pointedly, “Britain, Europe, Japan, and China will go down before America comes back up. This is turning into a synchronised bust, after all. The Global Slump of 2008-09 is under way.”

The Bank of England and the European Central Bank are still stubbornly refusing to cut rates because of inflation fears, which will be the least of our miseries in the next two years and should abate soon as global demand falls off the much-imagined cliff.

It’s probably true that Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve has saved the U.S. and other countries from another Great Depression. But nothing can stop a slump now because it’s already happening.