In the week of the crash in 1929, Wall Street fell by 23%. In the week of 6-10 October 2008, it fell by 18%; while London and Frankfurt fell by 21% and Japan's Nikkei by 24%. Every major financial centre's interbank market is frozen. Trust and confidence have collapsed; the global system is paralysed on a scale that now surpasses 1929. There is a combination of a worldwide bank-run, seizure of credit markets and collapse of asset values that could plunge the globe into a depression. This is history's joke: the crisis of capitalism long predicted by communists and socialists who are no longer able to take advantage of it.

(To read on, click here - and see Tony Curzon Price's response here)

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Will Hutton is chief executive of the Work Foundation. He writes a weekly column in the Observer.  His books include The World We’re In (Little, Brown, 2002), A Declaration of Interdependence: Why America Should Join the World (WW Norton, 2003), and The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century (Little, Brown, 2008)