Liaquat makes a second significant observation. He writes that the severity of the Great Depression was because it was not just one crisis but a series of crises that occurred over a relatively short period.  The  “economic whirlwind” that engulfed the globe was because each fed on the other. Thus it all began with the contraction of the German economy in 1928; its impact  ricocheted across the Atlantic to bring down Wall Street in 1929 and the US banks in 1930 and then returned to Europe in the summer of 1931 to unravel the continent’s finances. 

Our world has faced an analogous  set of problems — The Mexican peso crisis in 1994; the Asian currency crisis in 1997; the dotcom bubble burst in 2000 and the banking mayhem upon us today.  We did not, however, confront a comparably severe storm because of the disparate temporal and geographic spread of these problems.  They occurred over a 15 year time span and the authorities had time to manage one before the other hit.

The question that this observation triggers is: what if our current multiple problems coalesce?  What if the current mood of “deglobalisation” and “trade protectionism” undermines multilateralism and kills the Copenhagen talks; what if the surge in nationalism trigger further misadventures a la Iraq and Afghanistan; and the world is hit by another burst of dramatic terrorism (a la 26/11 or 9/11); what if the restive and emergent middle class finally get fed up of corrupt and ineffective leadership, and what if all this happens not in sequence but simultaneously.

... contd.