Climate health costs: bug-borne ills, killer heat
Tree-munching beetles, malaria-carrying mosquitoes and deer ticks that spread Lyme disease are three living signs that climate change is likely to exact a heavy toll on human health. These pests and others are expanding their ranges in a warming world, which means people who never had to worry about them will have to start.

Spain rearranges furniture as economy sinks

Moving a 17-metre high monument to Christopher Columbus 100 metres down the road is how the Spanish government is interpreting the advice of John Maynard Keynes. The economist once argued it would be preferable to pay workers to dig holes and fill them in again, rather than allowing them to stand idle and deprive the economy of the multiplier effect of their wages.

Picking up the pieces from Afghanistan’s war

U.S. gunners scanned a lush Afghan valley from their helicopter, as a  white van containing a badly burned baby inched toward another Black Hawk waiting at the army outpost. Eight soldiers had flown into the heart of hostile eastern Afghanistan, in a convoy of one air ambulance and one “chase” helicopter for protection, to collect 18-month-old Amanullah who knocked a pot of scalding water over his legs, penis and scrotum.

In Brazil, extreme weather stokes climate worries

No one could say they hadn’t seen it coming. The sand dunes had been advancing for decades before they swallowed the houses of families in Ilha Grande, an island in Brazil’s Parnaiba river delta. Standing on a dune that covers his old home, one man describes the landscape of his childhood — cashew trees as far as he could see. Not a dune in sight.

Angola’s hard-hitting beat electrifies the poor

It’s not break-dance, it isn’t rap either. The name is kuduro and its beat is electrifying dancers from Luanda to Lisbon and New York City. In Angola’s capital city, men and women are often seen performing robotic moves, bouncing off walls or pretending to drop dead once kuduro’s hard-hitting beat stops. The creator of kuduro, which means “hard-ass” in Portuguese, said he came up with the sound while watching martial arts expert Jean Claude Van Damme dance in a 1994 movie.

Cattle rustling on the rise as U.S. recession bites

Cattle theft is a growing problem as thieves realize that stealing cows is a relatively easy way to raise a quick buck. Stolen cattle are often taken straight from their farm or ranch to auction at a stockyard.  “When people think cattle rustling they think John Wayne. But it’s not like that. Cattle thieves are … technologically savvy. “

Fiat expansion stirs resentment in Italy’s south

Staring at the locked gates of a Fiat car factory, Mimmo Vacchiano says many families in this poor corner of southern Italy face a stark choice unless its turnstiles reopen. “If they close this plant, there’s nothing else here, only unemployment or the mafia.” Pomigliano d’Arco, a town of 40,000 people in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, relies on Fiat for its lifeblood. Residents now fear they may pay the price for cash-strapped Fiat’s high-stakes strategy to survive the recession by expanding to become the world’s second largest car maker.

Signs of recovery appear in Zimbabwe hospitals

The odors of death and decay are gone from the corridors of Zimbabwe’s biggest hospital, replaced by the smells of medicines and food for the patients who are once again coming for treatment. Nowhere is the change in Zimbabwe more evident than in the hospitals that just months ago failed so woefully to cope with a cholera epidemic that killed more than 4,000 people. Doctors and nurses have returned to Harare’s Parirenyatwa General Hospital. UNICEF has been helping to pay allowances to some doctors and nurses while the government is now paying them $100 a month like other state employees.

Boom-and-bust corner of California sees new hope

If the U.S. recession has an epicenter in California, it may be the  working-class neighborhoods called the “Inland Empire,” full of boarded-up homes, vacant storefronts, jobless workers. It faces years coping with foreclosed homes, jobless rates over 10 percent, a poorly educated workforce and empty warehouses.

Slain leaders’ heirs vie for Lebanon votes

The memory of assassinated Lebanese leaders lives in symbols and slogans of their heirs who are battling for Christian votes crucial to deciding the parliamentary election. Nayla Tueni and Nadim Gemayel are young, even by the standards of Lebanon’s dynastic politics. Running as allies in the June election, both evoke memories of fathers killed for their views.

Everglades swamped with invading pythons

The population of Burmese pythons in Florida’s Everglades may have grown to as many as 150,000 as the non-native snakes breed in the fragile wetlands. Wildlife biologists say they have been dumped by  owners who no longer want them and pose a threat to endangered species like the wood stork and Key Largo woodrat. “They eat things that we care about,” said an Everglades National Park biologist.

So President Medevedev would like to create a “Speakers’ Corner” in Central Moscow for Russians to vent their political passions.

“It looks cool,” Medvedev told a group of human rights activists. “I need to speak with the Russian authorities and build our very own Hyde Park.”
Was this just a rhetorical flourish to impress his guests, a signal that he would loosen the reins that his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, has pulled so tight? Free speech, say the rights activists, is not something Russian authorities have prized, whether on the streets or in the media. Would it, could it, work in Moscow? Where ever would you put it in that crowded, bustling city? Who would go there? What would they do there?
Singaporeans, not know for a culture of dissent and protest, have led the way, setting up their own speakers’ corner to protest over economic hardship. Hundreds meet there every Saturday to demand government help. No trouble reported yet.

The London speakers’ corner is held up by some as a symbol of British democracy, a place where anyone can stand on a box and say (more or less) whatever he wants without fear. Yes, in their day, Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx haunted the place, touting ideas that would have had them dragged away by police in their own countries. Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, wrote in her memoirs that the Bolshevik leaader was most impressed watching speakers “harangue the passing crowds on diverse themes”. All jolly stuff and not something he himself encouraged when he set up the dictatorship of the proletariat back at home.

These days though, for the most part, London’s speakers’ corner is a gathering place for quirky exhibitionists and comedians, political oddballs of left and right and religious eccentrics of all ilks warning sinful tourists of hell and damnation. The occasional thoughtful soul will read through Shakespeare’s sonnets or expound the virtues of a forgotten philosopher. Heckling seems to be a central part of the fun. A policeman may be at hand in case things turn nasty, but they rarely do.

Possibly, the spot in the north-east corner of Hyde Park was chosen for its closeness to Tyburn gallows where once the condemned would make their last declarations. The Moscow equivalent to Tyburn, I suppose, would be Red Square, where villains were put to death by the axe – though, in the Russian tradition, without those last words. Perhaps, then, Moscow’s Speakers’ Corner might fit nicely nearby at Alexandrov Gardens, at the Kremlin Walls. Arguably, though, a bit too close to
Medvedev’s seat of power. My proposal would be a few hundred metres up Tver Avenue, on Pushkin Square where the Soviet Union once maintained its own bizarre and macabre form of speakers’ corner. Perhaps I should call it the hat-takers-offers corner.

Every Human Rights Day, a keen crowd of journalists and plain-clothes KGB officers would gather in the winter cold around the perimeter of the square named after the great liberal poet Alexander Pushkin. As the hour of eleven approached, a tense hush would descend. A single figure would eventually appear, walk to the centre of the square, stand for a moment, and then take his hat (usually a rabbit-skin ‘shapka’) off; a symbolic protest against the suppression of human rights in the communist state.

In an instant, the KGB officers would swoop down upon him, drag him across the square, bundle him into a van and speed him off to the Lubyanka prison. A few minutes would pass and a second dissident would arrive, take off his hat and stand to attention before being likewise borne away by the forces of order. And so it went on.

Pity though the ‘innocent’ citizen who strayed unwittingly onto the square on that December day, carrying perhaps a magazine or a string bag of potatoes, and found himself suddenly the focus of this hawkeyed gathering. He would break his step and look around, of course, in wonder at his sudden and unexplained celebrity. Me?
That was more enough. Hat or no hat, he followed the rest, bundled into the van and away. It happened, sadly.

Finally, I ask myself who would pitch up at Moscow’s speakers’ corner and in what frame of mind? Memories of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the coups, the civil wars, the anger and the hardship, are still fresh. Economic crisis raises fears of another plunge into uncertainty and the eternal search continues. Kto Vinovat? Who is to blame?

What makes London’s Speakers’ Corner possible, amid all the mockery and sometimes quite pernicious views, is that most people just don’t take it seriously. They laugh, make fun. There may be anger but it knows its bounds. People throw up their hands and walk away, triumphant or humiliated before their peers.

How would Speakers’ Corner take root in Russian soil? Would liberal literati feast on Pushkin and Gogol, while the preachers invoke the fires of hell? Would it become a platform for Muscovites nursing private grievances against uncaring state institutions, the police, big business, the President? Could a Chechen malcontent plant his flag alongside angry nationalists and red-banner waving Stalinists?
Are Russians ready yet to laugh at profanity?

    The Indonesian rupiah has lost more than a fifth of its value against the dollar so far this year and on Friday hit its weakest point since August 1998. Authorities swooped in to take over an
insolvent Bank Century, the first such takeover since the Asian financial crisis a decade ago.

   Are things in Southeast Asia’s biggest economy really that dire to prompt comparisons with the chaotic events of a decade ago? Today’s financial crisis is draining liquidity from many banks across the world, including in Indonesia.  And as was the case a decade ago, domestic capital is swarming hot on the heels of foreign capital in fleeing Indonesia.

    It is the kind of vicious circle that characterised the”Asian Contagion” crisis of 1997/98. Currencies depreciate. Foreign investors liquidate their portfolios and swarm to the exits. Creditors call in loans, plunging institutions into insolvency. More people take their money and run, further undermining institutions and weakeninging the currency … And so it goes.

    Ten years ago, I was covering South Korea’s fraught journey into near national bankruptcy. (More echoes of the Asian Contagion crisis: The South Korean won hit lows not seen in a
decade on Friday and analysts forecast the economy will shrink next year for the first time since 1997). 

    My brother and sister-in-law were in Jakarta, where the financial crisis had morphed into a populist movement aimed at overturning the autocratic regime of the late president Suharto.
I had lived in Indonesia in the 1980s and I could hardly believe what was happening in Suharto’s Indonesia.  Food riots swept across Indonesia as the rupiah halved in value in the second half of 1997 — and then halved again in January alone. Panic-buying stripped supermarkets and other
stores of their wares.  ”An army of perfectly coiffed Indonesian matrons stormed the
supermarkets this week and bought out all the rice, flour, sugar and cooking oil,” my sister-in-law Cynthia Mackie wrote in her diary in mid-January 1998. “The foreigners smelled the panic and
got very excited at the idea of their dollars being four times as strong as in July.”

    Suharto was sworn-in for a seventh five-year term after his Golkar party won an incredulous 70 percent of the vote in yet another rigged election of his New Order period.  For years, Indonesians had accepted limits on their political freedoms in exchange for prosperity and growth. Now they had
neither. They turned their rage on ethnic Chinese, who though comprising just 5 percent of the population controlled well over half of the domestic economy.

    The killings of students in pro-democracy demonstrations in May 1998 spawned an orgy of rioting that convulsed Jakarta for two days. Chinatown was gutted. Around 1,200 people died, many of them trapped in burning buildings. Anarchy descended on the capital. Foreign embassies ordered a
mandatory evacuation of their nationals. Convoys of foreigners streamed past burning cars and buildings to the airport, leaving pets and belongings behind, including my brother and his wife.
They would not return for months.

    Indonesia is an altogether different place a decade later, at least politically. The world’s fourth-largest nation arguably has the most liberal democracy in Southeast Asia, a free-wheeling
press, and a legacy of reforms that has decentralised power.  Corruption is still a problem, and an elite class with old ties to the New Order — President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was the
head of the armed forces political faction at the time of Suharto’s resignation — dominates politics.     

    But Indonesia has improved its ranking in the corruption tables and people can vent
their frustrations in free and fair elections, due next year.  As John Milton famously said: “Anarchy is the sure consequence of tyranny”. Indonesia is heading into turbulent economic waters,
but don’t expect to see a reign of terror again in the streets.

Posted by Guy Faulconbridge

Not all of Russia’s rich businessmen are queuing up for a loan under a government rescue package offering billions of dollars in state funds to bail out oligarchs who have been badly hit by the global financial crisis.

Russian billionaires Oleg Deripaska and Mikhail Fridman this week got a total of $6.5 billion in loans from a state-owned bank to help them cover foreign debts secured against stakes in major Russian companies, according to industry sources.

But Alexander Lebedev says there is no reason state money should be used to save oligarchs, the name given to a small group of well connected businessmen who made fortunes in the chaos following the fall of the Soviet Union.

“Why is profit private but the losses put on everyone else? I don’t understand that at all. Why should the rich government save rich citizens. It is not right,” Lebedev told Reuters on the sidelines of an investor conference in Moscow.

“The task of the government is affordable housing, to subsidise mortgages, health and so on but not handing out billions of dollars to certain people,” said Lebedev, a former spy who made a fortune through banking deals in the 1990s.

Lebedev was ranked by Forbes in May as Russia’s 39th richest man with a fortune of $3.1 billion. He  said he had not asked for any help from the government.

Some of Russia’s richest men, many of whom borrowed heavily for expansion over recent years, have faced margin calls from banks on loans they took out secured against large stakes in Russian companies.

Wealth cold now be redistributed among Russia’s richest men as the state steps in to save selected businessmen from default.

Moscow stepped in this week to help some businessmen, a bitter-sweet reversal of the asset sales of the 1990s when the near-bankrupt state sold off some of the biggest raw materials companies to the oligarchs at huge discounts.

Deripaska, 40,  was one of the businessmen blessed with a state bailout this week. He was ranked in May as Russia’s richest man by Forbes with an estimated fortune of $28.6 billion.

United Company RUSAL, majority owned by Deripaska, received $4.5 billion from state bank VEB to pay back debt to foreign banks, which it amassed to buy a stake in mining giant Norilsk Nickel, banking sources said.

The 25 percent-plus-two shares stake in Norilsk was used as collateral for the loan and UC RUSAL was at risk of losing it if it failed to pay back the debt.

VEB has also agreed to disburse $2 billion to Fridman’s Alfa Group to help it pay back a loan to Deutsche Bank and rescue Alfa’s large stake in Russia’s No. 2 mobile phone firm, Vimpelcom which was used as collateral with the bank.

“Why did Deripaska get the money? Why did he get $4.5 billion?” said Lebedev.

Russia’s richest men — who say they risked their lives to build private business empires — are viewed with hostility in their own country for buying some of Russia’s biggest companies at a deep discount from the state in the chaos of the 1990s.

Lebedev said a better way to manage a bailout would be to nationalise the stakes and then sell them off at a later date.

“You should just tell the population: ‘You got cheated in the 1990s. They gave it all to some chaps who have now brought it back again,’” he said. ”Then you could then privatise these assets in a few years, but privatise them in the proper way, transparently.”

Lebedev also said he was opposed to the government’s use of VEB to invest directly in Russian stocks, a measure to calm Russia’s equity markets which have lost two thirds of their value this year.

“Why are they we so worried? Who gets hurt from the stock market? There are 800,000 people on that market and 500,000 of them are officials who bet their own money and a few dozen oligarchs.”

Hungary has negotiated a $25 billion economic rescue package with the IMF, the EU and the World Bank. What else is new? As that non-Hungarian philosopher of gamesmanship Yogi Berra put it, it’s ”like déjà vu all over again”.  

Consider the words of historian Paul Lendvai who wrote: ”Its economy in tatters, Hungary accepts a loan of 250 million gold crowns.” “Fiscal stability was restored, a currency reform was introduced…and after a modest upswing the value of industrial production stood 12 percent higher…”

The date? The 1920s. The lender: The League of Nations. Only the details have changed.

Hungary seems never to have encountered a global financial crisis it didn’t jump into head first.

If you want to see pictures of banknotes discarded on the street as trash (one is widely available on the Web) just dig in the archives for photos from post-World War Two Budapest.

Inflation in Zimbabwe has hit astounding heights of 230 million percent, but in 1946 prices in Hungary rose by more than 40 quadrillion percent a month.

Over the past century, Hungary has had three different currencies — the korona, the pengo and the forint, each introduced when the previous tanked.

The perky forint — the same currency that is in a bit of a pickle today — made its debut in 1946 at an exchange rate of one forint equal to 400 octillion pengo — a number that was essentially more than all the pengo then in circulation.

Hungarian inflation today of under 6 percent is not remotely in the ballpark of the 1940s and the chances of total collapse are slim to non existent.

Hungary is a member of the European Union and NATO and its economy is substantial. One of Hungary’s local banks, OTP, is a regional heavyweight. The Audi car plant in Gyor, western Hungary, churns out engines and the hot Audi TT sports car.

But there is cause for concern. Why has Hungary been hit harder than most, putting it in the company of  Pakistan, Ukraine and Belarus which have also been talking to the IMF.

Hungary’s external debt amounted to 89.9 billion euros, or 93.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), in the second quarter of 2008. This is not good at a time when banks are reluctant to lend to each other, let alone to a central European country with a history of currency collapse.

A good part of Hungary’s debt is Swiss franc or euro currency loans taken out to buy property or cars. As investors pull money out of Hungary, the forint declines in value and repaying those loans becomes harder.

“What I am paying a month all of a sudden rose above 110,000 forints ($532.80) from 90,000 (forints), so we need to restructure our spending,” a businessman with a mortgage in Swiss francs said.

At the same time, Hungary has gone from golden child of emerging Europe after communism collapsed to laggard in the race to adopt the euro. With chronic budget deficits, including a whopper in 2006 that was triple the EU guideline, Hungary’s joining date has been postponed again and again.

In good times, world leaders talk about globalisation and mutual cooperation. In bad times, everyone tends to scramble for cover.

Hungary’s rescue package is substantial and, as Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” But if it is, Hungarians have been there before — and know how to sweep the banknotes into the gutter.

The  global financial crisis has become a topic of feverish debate for al Qaeda sympathisers on militant Internet forums.

According to  the U.S.-based SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors  al Qaeda-linked propaganda on the Web and translates it for the benefit of security analysts and counter-terrorism officials, the militant chat rooms have been buzzing for weeks with excited comment.

“Now Sheikh Osama bin Laden has an historic opportunity to crash America completely. Al Qaeda, which has caused America to be ruined economically in Iraq and Afghanistan, has an opportunity to deliver the fatal blow,” wrote a member of a Turkish militant forum recently.  “Al Qaeda could bury America into the landfill of history with an operation similar to or greater than September 11.”

In a discussion on al-Hesbah, a password-protected forum linked to al Qaeda,  one participant gloated that the U.S. economy is “on the precipice”, SITE reported.

He continued: ”Now is a golden opportunity and a gift from Allah that we should not lose. If America is hit now, by Allah, it will never survive, until Allah permits it … I can see that victory is closer than expected.”

Such ”chatter” has attracted the attention of Western intelligence officials. Ernst Uhrlau (pictured), head of Germany’s BND foreign intelligence agency, told Reuters in an interview this week that the financial crisis had emboldened some Islamist militants but it was too early to say if it would help them attract new recruits.

“We’re hearing some first voices on this. Some see the fact that the United States has been so shattered by the financial crisis, and that its dominant role in the world is shaken, as confirmation the West can be beaten,” Uhrlau said.

Al Qaeda has always placed high value on economic targets. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, razed in the Sept. 11 attacks, were chosen both as an iconic New York landmark and a symbol of U.S. capitalism. It’s a fair bet that the next statement from Osama bin Laden or his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri — perhaps in the  less than two weeks remaining until the U.S. election — will make great play on the current crisis and boast of how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have drained the U.S. economy.

But it’s doubtful whether all of this translates into a heightened security threat to America. The official threat level has remained unchanged for more than two years, and the fact is that al Qaeda has failed to land a blow on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001.  In the Reuters interview, Uhrlau questioned whether it was capable of staging more attacks on the scale of 9/11. 

For the time being, its sympathisers can only wait, hope — and put forward their own ideas. In another discussion monitored by SITE, one participant suggested a plan for an attack aimed at bankrupting a U.S. bank. Some contributors praised the idea, but one was more sceptical.  “Why bother, their economy is collapsing by itself,” he wrote.

The global financial crisis has produced broad agreement that the world needs a new financial architecture, but world leaders are a long way from reaching agreement on what shape it should take.

Many countries have rescue plans to support banks and unfreeze credit markets. The United States has set in motion reforms to change the relationship between Washington and Wall Street.

But calls are being made for much deeper, coordinated reforms, and a series of global summits is planned to discuss how to reform the financial system. The first of these meetings will be held on Nov. 15 in the United States.

Capitalism as we used to know it may be on its deathbed. Some world leaders have called for a revamp of the 1944 Bretton Woods conference that resulted in the post-World War Two financial order and created the IMF and the World Bank. 

Economists and commentators have been filling newspapers with suggestions about what should be included in the new financial architecture, from more regulation to concerns about climate change and trade.

Some experts say world leaders risk making terrible mistakes of they get it wrong and must stand back and properly assess what went wrong before enacting wholesale reforms. Others say it would be wrong to force one country or region’s vision on another.

There is little doubt we are now, as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown put it, at a “defining moment” for the world economy. But there are more questions than answers.

Can world leaders overcome their differences and live up to the task? Will they have any concrete proposals to discuss on Nov. 15? Will it be more than a big talking shop?

As financial and philanthropist George Soros says, what kind of system will evolve from this is a very open question. 

If the financial crisis looks bad, I for one am thinking it might have been even worse — in the euro zone at least — had European countries not decided to pool their economies together by launching the single European currency.

I covered Europe in the 1980s from Belgium and Luxembourg when the idea of a single currency was still the pipe dream of a few old men who back in the 1950s had been inspired by the idea of a united Europe emerging from the rubble of World War Two.

Then in the 1990s,  I was based in Paris when France and Germany, the powerhouse duo of European integration, struggled to align  their economies in preparation for European monetary union. In a smaller version of what is happening now, huge volumes of money washed around Europe’s financial system, as currency dealers bet that the governments of Europe would never be able to pull it off. 

The spending restraints needed to knock economies into shape were hugely unpopular, yet governments — mindful of the competitive devaluations of previous decades — stuck to them in the hope of better days ahead. I remember then Bank of France governor Jean-Claude Trichet patiently explaining to journalists the need for monetary union, so that individual countries were no longer vulnerable to a run on their currencies that would force up interest rates to suffocating levels.

The launch of the euro in 1999 was one of the very rare triumphs of politics over markets.

Looking at what is happening now, the early visionaries of European integration seem remarkably prescient. Or put more directly: If there were no European Central Bank, how many more Icelands would we have inside the euro zone?

Of course, this picture may be too rosy. Europe has struggled to form a coordinated response, as Paul Taylor says in this analysis.  “Since the  credit crunch swept into Europe from the United States last month,” he writes, “European countries have gone their separate ways in rescuing distressed banks, guaranteeing some or all deposits and suspending practices like short-selling shares.”

So am I being over-optimistic in thinking that the euro is one of the few bedrocks that we have right now, for which we have to thank those who conceived and gave birth to it in the 20th century? What would have happened had there been no single currency? And how well will that bedrock withstand the challenges today?

I’d almost forgotten he was there, in my home. Then came the global economic crisis with its visions of apocalypse, and he caught my eye again, this fiery orator, this ruthless revolutionary killer, the scourge of global capitalism.

His is the first face — hornrimmed glasses, goatee beard — guests might see as I usher them into my living room. My treasured, framed photograph of Lev Davidovich Trotsky
posing like some uneasy tourist, cap in hand, before a spreading palm tree in Sochi, commands pride of place. Not that I admire the man.

It was more the circumstances that delivered him to me.

I was working in Moscow, the Soviet Union was collapsing around me. The High and Mighty, Politburo members, so long distant, mysterious figures, were suddenly skittled from power and revealed in once undreamt-of meetings as the banalities most were. While the flesh was discredited, dusty old documents and photographs that had slept disregarded in secret Soviet archives took on a throbbing vitality as archive doors opened to me.

Yellowed paper, tragic, hand-annotated testimonies of men about to be slaughtered, the cruel scribbled jests of their executioners, came alive in my hands; then there was Lev Davidovich’s holiday snap, taken months before he was driven into exile and then bludgeoned to death with an ice axe by one of Stalin’s henchmen. Documents can have a strange power.

Those were the heady days when it was easy to declare the death of socialism, the final triumph of capitalism. New free market economies were set up with a missionary zeal throughout the old Soviet Empire and beyond, from Prague to Beijing. Throughout the world, capitalism was being honed, refined, its brutal bears and wild bulls tamed. A new kind of capitalism.

Finance houses found new ways to handle credit, raise money and spread risk. Markets melded together in the revolutionary global movement my Russian lodger had sought a century ago to make his own.

Now, Trotsky would have known nothing of derivatives, leveraging, swap spreads, abusive shorting or securitisation — the whole scaffold of advanced instruments mounted with such faith by those kings of finance. That stony visage, staring into the camera, would have broken into a smile though at the very notion of capitalism uniting the world and then collapsing, as he would see it, under the weight of own contradictions.

The American government takes over (the word ‘nationalise’ is pointedly not uttered) mighty finance houses Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, bails out a huge insurance company, and offers loans in return for equity. Most recently the Bush administration has sent Congress a $700-billion plan to purchase bad mortgage debt from financial institutions. One by one the heads roll, the state stake billows. Criticism abounds.

“The failure of each large institution set off a search for who might be the next target,” wrote Harold James, on Sept 17, in the Financial Times.

At stake of course is not just the American economy but the global system itself. True, these are not the expropriations in the name of the proletariat that the bloody Red Army chief promoted as he criss-crossed Russia on his red-flag-bedecked armoured train.

But he had always said the world communist revolution could triumph only if it once succeeded among the advanced capitalist countries — and it had to be global.

Lev Davidovich Trotsky, hanging there patiently over the jardiniere, might be hoping for too much, if he expects a global collapse to stir a worldwide uprising in the name of communism.

But there is a new glint in his eye.

The fear in recent days has been palpable in the business area of London’s Canary Wharf where I now work — far from the old home of world socialism.

“Bankers, like everyone else, like to suck on a comfort blanket. In the middle of any episode of banking weakness or financial turmoil their oft-repeated claim is that they have learnt the right lessons from the Great Depression,” James wrote. “It became an article of faith that a catastrophe of that magnitude could not occur again.”

It is for the architects of modern economic capitalism to design the failsafe structure that keeps the dogs of chaos at bay.

In the meantime, I glance occasionally at Lev Davidovich, standing before that palm tree in his collarless tunic and leather jackboots. The very suggestion of chaos will make any parent think anxiously of the world his children will grow up in. Lev Davidovich has the look of a man ready to wait.

“I know well enough, from my own experience, the historical ebb and flow,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Mere impatience will not expedite their change.”

Depending on where you stand, the financial crisis has been catastrophic or brought a much needed shake out in the financial sector; it has been disastrous for home owners or proved the folly of lending to people with poor credit histories; it has rightly rolled back the clock on naked capitalism or undermined a system that, in essence, functions perfectly well; it has punished bankers’ hubris or thrown many talented individuals out of work.

What you see depends on where you stand.

According to Italy’s economy minister,  Giulio Tremonti, the current economic crisis was the inevitable consequence of policies championed by former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan.

“The mastery turned out to be madness. Alan Greenspan was considered a master. Now it should be asked whether, after Bin Laden, is it not he who has done the most harm to America?”, Tremonti was quoted as saying in an interview with Corriere della Sera newspaper this week.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in April, Greenspan hit back at his detractors. “I was praised for things I didn’t do,” he said. “I am now being blamed for things that I didn’t do.”

The debate over what happened and why, who is to blame and where we go from here has sent bloggers and columnists into overdrive. Here are links to some on the UK economy, the Paulson doctrine and AIG and Lehman. There is an argument that the United States’ response to the crisis is evidence of its waning financial power.

Who has got it right?