KEY POINTS:
Maybe I spoke too soon. A few columns ago, I cited environmental guru James Lovelock's prediction that climate change chaos will break out some time between 2020 and 2030 as conclusive evidence that the baby boomer generation has timed its run to perfection.
Whereas previous generations had to
endure plague, war, depression and washing dishes by hand, baby boomers have enjoyed relative peace, albeit courtesy of mutually assured destruction, while decades of plenty have erased the memory of the wretchedness of the inter-war years.
But within a matter of days panic was sweeping through the international financial system and the media was awash with chilling historical analogies. Former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan described the state of the markets as the most wrenching since the end of World War II.
No one has any clue as to where this is going to end, wailed a strategist at Lombard, the UK finance house. It's a self-feeding disaster. As each day goes by, this looks more like the 1930s.
The Daily Telegraph gave new meaning to the term interactive media by seeking reader feedback on the burning question: Is Britain heading for a great depression? One would have thought the question was better directed at the paper's money market reporters and economic pundits.
Amid the warnings that the US financial system was in danger of meltdown, President George W. Bush made an upbeat, economically literate assessment: Everything's going to be fine.
The problem is Bush is widely regarded as the most beef-brained, complacent, incompetent occupant of the White House since Herbert Hoover, whose name will be synonymous with the Great Depression.
Such was Hoover's detachment from reality that when urged in June 1930 to initiate a public works relief programme, he heehawed, "Gentlemen, you've come 60 days too late, the depression is over."
Nine years later 17 per cent of the American work force was still unemployed. That was down from 25 per cent at the absolute trough, 1933, by which stage US gross national product declined by a third and 9000 banks failed.
America sneezed and the world caught a cold, although the Soviet Union and Germany were comparatively unaffected.
The collectivisation of agriculture inflicted such suffering on the USSR that Western-style depression would have been, to borrow from the Monty Python sketch, luxury by comparison.
Untroubled by the orthodoxy of fiscal rectitude that elsewhere was making a bad situation worse, the Nazis happily borrowed and spent their way out of a hole, achieving full employment by 1935.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal are often given the credit for pulling America and the world out of depression, but the real catalyst was the vast increase in government spending occasioned by the outbreak of war. As Galbraith puts it, Hitler, having ended unemployment in Germany, had gone on to end it for his enemies.
Even though we have Dr Cullen's word for it that, at the very least, we're headed for a technical recession, I suspect alarm over the possibility of something altogether nastier going in one ear and out the other. These are strange times. Despite our good fortune, as a society we seem to be in a perpetual state of anxiety.
This neurosis is fuelled by the health industry and the nanny state, always on the lookout for new things for us to fret about, and the media which relishes being the bearer of bad news.
The recent scare campaign targeted at middle-aged professional people who enjoy a few glasses of wine is a case in point. Take a dodgy survey, some heavily massaged statistics, some publicity-seeking officials and hey presto: something that should barely be on the health system's radar becomes a cause for guilt and a problem requiring urgent attention.
But when it comes to the big picture, we're like the villagers in the fable of the boy who cried wolf.
The spectre of global financial collapse is just another false alarm, this year's bird flu.
