A great article here that i picked up in The Week which discusses how the globalisation of financial markets and the subsequent dependence on super-computers and algorithms has blurred the boundaries to the point of no return.
A
spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of capitalism. A vast and highly
unstable mixture of debt — trillions of dollars of sovereign, corporate and
private borrowing accumulated over decades — is strapped to the advanced
Western economies like a suicide bomber’s gelignite vest.
The task facing our politicians is somehow to
defuse this bomb without inadvertently triggering the sequence of defaults and
bankruptcies that would set it off. No wonder they walk around the problem
scratching their heads, prodding it gingerly here and there. The horrible truth
is dawning that the problem may well not be technically solvable.
For the
first time in my life — I am 54 — I get the sense of what it must have been
like to have lived in my grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ generation: in
1913, say, or 1937. One feels a great smash coming ever closer, almost in
slow-motion, and yet there seems to be nothing that can be done to avoid it.
How have
we got ourselves into this mess? After all, we were supposed to be living in an
era of unprecedented peace and prosperity. Communism had
collapsed and the threat of nuclear annihilation had receded. Immense advances
in computer technology were creating whole new economies. Vast markets were
opening up in the developing world. Above all, we were supposed to have learned
enough about economics to have created the necessary institutions — the World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the G20, the OECD — to ensure we never
repeated the mistakes of the Thirties.
Where did it all go
wrong? To read more click the link here
Robert Harris’s new novel, The Fear Index.
