Interest rates, the flow of funds and perhaps - by default - Armageddon

So I suggest we try to shake ourselves free of the dogmas - or ideologies - of the past in order to rescue what are the most vital of those ideologies. In particular, we need to assess carefully how seriously capitalism itself is at risk and what we must do to preserve it.

We should also recall that the Great Depression could not really be said to have ended without the intervention of World War II and the fundamental reappraisal of our economic and financial policies to which that appalling conflict led.

We do not want a World War III to deliver us from our present mess. I do not believe that to be our "only option". But we have not yet begun to tackle the real issues, some samples of which I have identified above.

So far, we have been more obsessed with bailing out banks so guilty in such a plethora of ways that, if they are "rescued", we must never allow them to behave with such arrogant irresponsibility again.

Through our democratic institutions, we must determine the right paths to take - and the banks, innocent or guilty, must come along with us.

It is not enough to talk about new, tougher regulations, recapitalisation and disciplining the bonus culture. Though necessary, those proposals do not go nearly far enough. We must reform the fundamentals of the way the economy and its financial system work, both domestically and globally.

We must do this in the comprehensive way we reformed our domestic and world economy after World War II. Anything less will not be enough. Rather I would hope we would do more, more strenuously this time, because the social, political and strategic stakes - going far beyond the economic and financial stakes - are even more compelling this time.

If we do not get it right now, the opportunity to have a second go may never occur.

The rescue of the economic system after World War II was achieved by governments acting together. We must seek to achieve stability and sustainable growth now through governments acting together again. The "public option" cannot possibly be ignored. On the contrary, it must be warmly embraced.

That does not mean that capitalism as our economy’s essential system will or should be abandoned. On the contrary, just as after World War II, it must be preserved and strengthened in ways that resort to the "public option" alone can accomplish.

We need governments to participate in "recovery" from our present difficulties on much the same scale as during and after World War II. We should not shrink from that. It offers a future for prosperity and peace in the world community which is infinitely superior in quality to bailing out zombie banks and restoring some facade of acceptance to Wall Street and the financial system which have failed us - and the democratic capitalist system - so miserably and so irresponsibly in the recent past.