The president looks blankly at his nervous economic advisors. He wants to know how bad the financial crisis is. The men from the treasury glance at each other for morale support. Phrases like "meltdown" and "cataclysmic destruction of western economies" are bandied about. Out in the real world, the hero is running through deserted streets, his high-heeled love-interest in tow. As they stumble through rubble, financial institutions literally crumble around them. I wake up and realise it was only a nightmare.
Of course, we are going through economic turmoil we have not seen in our collective living memory, but it's going to be ok. Honestly. George Bush is pumping almost incalculable amounts of tax-payers money into these long standing financial institutions. National banks around the world are throwing into global economies, wads of cash as if they were nothing more than bits of paper.
Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, allowed a small bank that invested well during the times of hedonistic loan agreements, to buy HBOS bank, the UK's largest mortgage provider: A bank that didn't behave responsibly with its customer's money when times were good.
One would have thought that such actions by our leaders and experienced financial institutions would kill off any concerns that the world as we know it from falling around our ears, but the fact is - such actions have made no difference to our deep concerns. Even the most optimistic speculators believe the worst is yet to come.
So why aren't all these safety measures making a difference? Well, there is the obvious fact that these politicians and financiers are the fat cats and their government cronies who got us into this mess in the first place.
There is also the realisation that successive governments on both sides of the Atlantic have a tradition of knee-jerk reactionary policy making. In the 1980s the Republicans and Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives backed Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden under an ill-thought through policy of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", without spending a moment's worth of analysis on possible consequences of such a strategy.
In the UK, the rail industry was quickly privatised in a bid to save money in such a fashion that the British taxpayer now pays more in rail subsidies than it did when the state owned the railways. Of course, the British people get nothing of the huge profits the transport moguls enjoy. Roads, prisons, fuel and crime have all suffered from short-term, short-sighted policies. How can we believe this current financial crisis has benefited from the luxury of a calmly approached risk assessment? There has hardly been time to report the loss of one bank before another was seen teetering on the brink.
At least in the US, Bush has acquired something for all the money he has thrown at the problem: almost all the houses in the US, in fact. OK, some of them are polluted with toxic debt, but not all. When the housing market settles again, the US government can sell houses like there's no tomorrow - which is how most of us feel, now!
In the UK, Gordon Brown is "lending" money to banking financiers - the very people who got us into this mess. So far his largess has amounted to £100,000 ($200,000). There is no payback agreement to these loans, no timeframe or penalties for late/non-payments. A lot of people in the UK think this money will never be seen again, except in the multi-million pound bonuses of Chief Executives.
In addition, by allowing the takeover of a big bank by a smaller, safe bank, Gordon Brown has created of the UK's very own Freddie Mac or Fanny Mae: LloydsTSB, now responsible for around one third of all UK mortgages. In doing so, Gordon Brown disregarded concerns that such a superbank will have too much commercial power in more stable times.
None of this is going to put an end to the devastation of capitalism that we are all living through. Banks depend on trust - trust of its customers and of other banks and financial institutions. They no longer have that trust. Neither do the politicians who are putting together desperate short-term measures to solve long-term predicaments.
These rapid changes to the banking system that are mesmerising us in the West are making it almost impossible to predict where they will take us, but one thing is already certain. The gloating of capitalism winning over communism has been brought to a crashing and sudden end. As the bricks and mortar of the Berlin wall crumbled some twenty years ago, so now has the commercial pillars of our Capitalist society. Lehman Bros and HBOS have gone. AGI, Freddie Mac: gone in all but name, and others like Morgan Stanley are teetering. Nations are bearing up for a long recession. Russians are openly saying their country had been safer in communist times. I am surprised that Fidel Castro hasn't died laughing at the seemingly evident demise of Capitalism.
What is amazing is that communism can gloat to be the saviour of the West. For it is state intervention and state ownership - those two great pillars of communism - that are being utilised by Bush, Brown and other western leaders, and it is Communist China that is likely to race ahead as a superpower who will benefit most from the financial crisis.
We can no longer say that communism doesn't work any more than we can say that capitalism has worked. The truth is they have both been the saviour of each other. Free markets helped open up Russia and break the soviet bloc. They are also a contributing factor in the emergence of China and India as growing economies. Now that bastion of Communism: state ownership has halted the decline in America's fortunes.
In short: Communist ideals have saved the US. That realisation, that truth is the new world order. If we, politicians and financiers included, don't accept that fact, we cannot rebuild the trust in our financial markets.
Gari Sullivan
