Is the world, including Canada, headed for the third Great Depression, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argues? Watching the results of the Toronto G8/G20 meetings was like hearing news that a giant comet is heading for earth and we are just waiting for impact. Those meetings of the world's largest and/or growing economies committed governments to massive deficit reduction in spite of the real concern that we are facing a the possibility of a so-called "double-dip" recession. That possibility is now a certainty.
world economics
Summit power politics, fancy formulae and the madness of crowds
At the height of the 1999 World Trade Organization ministerial meeting in Seattle, just as the proceedings were being suffocated by tens of thousands of street protesters, Pascal Lamy, then the EU's trade commissioner and now WTO director general, pronounced that what the world was witnessing in Seattle was "a medieval process."
Within earshot of Monsieur Lamy, legions of baton-totting gladiatorial robocops smacked their shins in unison. The Seattle Trade and Convention Center, from which M. Lamy uttered those words, had become a hollow fortress as the riotous discontents outside drew a line, ate Roquefort, and whacked a few store fronts.