The endlessly repeated question put by the media to the captains of industry, business leaders and government economic ministers is ‘When will the current global economic crisis end?’ 

The answers range from the sunny optimists with one eye on the dwindling confidence of their investors, who talk of the second half of this year, to the more pessimistic, who perhaps have the other eye on the bankruptcy courts, and who speak, equally airily, of 2010 or beyond. 

But couldn’t they all be wrong? 

Why should this depression ever end?   

And let’s get one piece of local nonsense out of the way. Pundits in Thailand cheerfully look back at 1997 and point to the fact that we got out of that one.  So we can get out of this one, right? 

Well, there is an important difference from 12 years ago.  We then had an economy that was very dependent on selling to foreign markets using credit from foreign markets.  Thailand (with the help of the IMF) took a few too many risks and (with the help of the hedge funds) got punished for it.  But the foreign markets were still there.  They hadn’t disappeared. 

There was some talk at the time about rebuilding a differently structured economy with less dependence on exports.  But this would have entailed building a stronger domestic market.  In turn this would mean a substantial increase in the purchasing power of the average Thai and a switch in production from what could be sold in the export markets to what Thais want to buy.  

That was all too improbable and, Thailand’s entrepreneurs and technocrats let their thoughts run along familiar lines and produced a replica of the economic model that had just gone whoopsy, except that this time an even greater proportion of export production capacity was foreign owned, so there is even less likelihood that capital will respond to patriotic calls. 

And the house of cards is tumbling about our ears again, but this time, it’s not just us.  No amount of stimulus packages or gains in competitiveness (aka lay-offs and wage cuts) will compensate for the fact that the export markets have disappeared for the foreseeable future.   

The attempts made so far to tackle the global economic mess are hamstrung by two factors. 

One concerns the answer to the question: ‘What do you do economically in bad times?’   

Now most people, when faced with sudden unemployment, catastrophic illness or a bad day at the racetrack, will cut back on expenses simply because they have less to spend.  People faced with the possibility of similar economic problems will also spend less by diverting more of their income into savings, just in case.   

Sensible responses.  But not what the system needs.  If we spend less, businesses earn less, employ fewer people, who spend less and so on, and all the while the government’s tax base shrinks by the minute.  The system needs more spending, not less, and consequently less saving, not more.   

If we all, households, businesses, banks, do what is sensible for ourselves individually, it is bad for us all collectively. 

It wasn’t always like this.  In World War Two, the government’s advice to the individual was to ‘buy a bond’, i.e. save.  In the War on Terror, the Bush government’s advice in the aftermath of 9/11 was ‘go shopping’. 

The second difficulty we face is that our political masters appear to think that the way out of this mess is to give more money to our economic masters, who happen to be the same people that got us into this mess in the first place (partly thanks to the connivance of the same political masters who let them get away with it).  

Now just on the face of it this doesn’t sound right.  If your teen-aged son totals the family car, the last thing you would do is give him the money to buy himself new wheels. 

But government money buys shares in banks, so that they regain the capital base to go back to doing what banks are supposed to do – shift capital in an efficient and mutually beneficial manner from those who have too much to those who have too little.  But these shares are special non-voting shares.  The public (present and future) now owns part of these banks, and will, we are assured, benefit from future profits (and presumably suffer from future losses).  But the public has no say in how the banks are run and hence no way to ensure that the banks do what the public wants, rather than what the other, voting, share-holders might want. 

This is straight from the capitalist dogma that economic systems don’t need any systems engineers.  Given enough clever people with enough ‘enlightened self-interest’ (the capitalist euphemism for greed), the system, it is believed, will run perfectly well without interference by government.  Or anyone else.  Something to ponder the next time your car engine conks out and you can’t find a car mechanic. 

Crises, we are forever told, are opportunities.  There should be opportunities for dealing with this one, not just to solve the problems, but to devise something that is better than what just stopped working.  Something that does not encourage despoliation of the planet, greed, exploitation and all the other unwanted by-products of capitalism. 

But if we remain convinced that we can continue to act as individuals and there is no need for collective action, then this crisis may be presenting us with insoluble.