The world is lurching toward another financial meltdown.  Debt is spiralling out of control with all the superpowers going the same way as Japan.  The USA, China and the Eurozone, are piling up debt which is unsustainable.  Add to that the Trump proposition of turning inward  and starting trade wars and the recipe becomes more poisonous.

There seems a disconnect between the macro economic planners and the ordinary citizen, the man in the street who is still blithely encouraged to max out his credit cards and gamble as wildly as he can.  The idea of responsibility and restraint seem to have vanished from our psyche.  Even the memory of the recent bankers crash seems to have faded with astonishing alacrity.

Low interest rates have been seen as the cure to stimulate damaged economies but of course these measures have encouraged more borrowing and less saving thus exacerbating the debt spiral.

Debt equals hardship, if not now, then certainly when the debt is called in.  This is true for  national as well as personal debt.  When are we going to wake up?  Already we see slow or no growth and productivity stuck in a rut.  Going backwards and digging filthy coal is surely not the answer.

Hence the mass return to populism, the easy buck promise is in the ascendancy.  Trump, Farage, Barron et al, shout for the easy way out, namely, screw your neighbour.

Meanwhile the poor get relatively poorer and the rich richer as the manipulative money engineers continue to hedge and make money out of distressed high streets and edgy currency markets.  For example Bitcoins may be an abstract to most of us but it is yet again a method to help those who have the financial muscle to make hideous amounts of money.  At whose expense?  Somebody like you and me.