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The Times - Cheer up. A bit of a crisis does us no harm
Our columnist on the amazing buoyancy of the global markets, by Gerard Baker

In the good old days of the Cold War, when the West had one of its periodic financial panics, we always had the Soviets on hand to remind us of the mortality of capitalism.

As the Dow Jones tumbled and bankers threw themselves from Wall Street window ledges, Moscow could be relied on to produce some cheerful bigwig from the Politburo to explain that things like this never happened under communism. With some deft quote from Karl Marx (or, if he was subtle, John Maynard Keynes) the clever Russian would lecture us on the essential crisis of capitalism and its inevitable collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

These days, the Soviets are long gone, in hot pursuit of profits on global energy markets, and the communists in China have got the most overheated stock market in the world. But even in our post-historical age, we are not quite free from the occasional lapse of faith. Today, financial alarms still have the power to induce a sense of existential crisis, at least for our economic system if not for ourselves.

The tendency is made worse of course by a modern media obsessed with presenting every spot of bother as the End of the World. The poor Russians. If only they’d known. Their endless prating about alienation and surplus labour was no match for a modern business reporter in search of a headline. This summer’s malaise in financial markets is a powerful case in point. Armed with their quiver of short, handy nouns, the scribblers besiege us daily with Panics, Crashes, Crunches, and my personal favourite, Meltdowns.

Hehehee.