Globalisation is at an end; discuss. Because a reregulated globalisation is a contradiction in terms. And I may get the Nobel Prize for economics for having seen it all coming. Maybe I won't.

For I wrote a book, you see, called First Abolish the Customer: 202 Arguments Against Economic Rationalism, which was read in libraries and other people's lavatories by about a hundred thousand Australians with nothing better to do. It was about how, if you sack too many people, or you underpay and impoverish too many people, there aren't enough customers left to sell things to, and the economy goes to hell. I wrote it in 1998 and nobody attacked any one of the arguments. They tiptoed away from the argument. They were above such things.

And lo, it has come to pass. Americans too impoverished to buy houses had stopped making their payments, and cash their creditors owed to lending entities further up the money chain could not be paid either, and like bird flu the illness swept across the planet, and here we are. And I was right; and Michael Costa and Peter Costello and all the neocons and Friedmanites and Tim Blair were wrong. And we are now in big trouble.