Yes, exactly, who knows? And this is pricisely the question, we don't have a clue. This unknowness is what's causing so much instability, the doubt, the fear, the horror, of where we might be heading, into a world we don't know, a world we don't understand or recognise.

I think, if we are ulucky, we could well see a slump on a scale that we haven't seen since the 1930's. In many ways it could be worse, as this is developing into a truly global crisis as the economies of the world are so interconected. What's happening? The world's economy is slowly grinding to a halt. Many sectors of the real economy are now, in reality, collapsing, on scale and at a speed not seen since the Great Depression.

How one get's the world's economy going again is a really hard question to answer. It may be a question with no real answer. I'm not sure Keynesian remedies will work this time. I'm not even sure they worked last time! If it was the second world war that really and finally ending the Great Depression, the creation of form of centrally controlled, state, command economy, preparing for war, then we have a lot of hard thinking to do.

I think "old-school" capitalism, the dogma of the "free market" is pretty much dead and buried. What we are seeing is the evolution, at speed, of new type of economy, a merging of state and market on an almost unprecedented scale. How this will influence the rest of society is too big a question to get into right now, though I do think it will have a profound affect.