As surely as night follows day, credit crunches are followed by recessions, if not great depressions. Whether we are on the verge of a 21st century version of the 1930s, however, still remains to be seen.
But the possibility or even the probability of that happening should not be rejected out of hand. For the global jungle is a far from benign place, and there are rules and dynamics operating in there that the world of 70-odd years ago did not need to worry about.
For one, there is the question of poverty in affluence. This is the issue of the working poor in mature, developed econo-mies, and has even been an issue for some time in Japan, which once believed itself to be the most equal society in the world.