THE farewell to 2009 Thursday night was marked by a blue moon which about sums up the rarity of the agglomeration of exceptional events that has left the world nervous and angry for its future. The year began with outrage and despair as Israel launched a rain of death on the luckless inhabitants of Gaza. It ended with a rising tattoo of explosions, many of them made by suicide bombers in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In between the actual violence we have seen the clear beginnings of a new nuclear arms race. There has been the abject failure of the international community to agree at Copenhagen on what to do about climate change and even renewed concern at the soundness of the science which asserts the cause is man-made pollution. The only clear evidence is that there are radical changes to the weather as the devastating Jeddah floods last month demonstrated so vividly. This said however, the hard truth is that much of the death of destruction in all such disasters in recent years, not least in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, was caused by gross human error or incompetence.
The global financial markets spent much of the year in turmoil with high price volatility in key commodities such as oil. First World governments continued to pour taxpayers’ money into their economies to stop recession turning to a full-blown economic depression. As the year ended, the tactic seemed to be working. Now, however, the focus of nervous investors is turning from financially shaky companies and banks to whole struggling economies. The vast sums of new money created to save the financial system now have to be paid back, before serious price inflation starts to take hold. Lean times lie ahead for many developed countries, with higher taxes, less spending on key government services such as health and welfare and more job losses.
In North America and Europe, the high sense of anxiety generated by this knowledge was enhanced by the appreciation of another, ultimately more alarming reality. Financial power is slipping away from the hands that have long assumed an exclusive right to wield it. The emergence of China and India as the new global economic nexus is now clear. But few in the West yet dare contemplate the full implications of this change after almost 500 years of European and then North American hegemony. There is a facile belief that to succeed India and China will need to assume Western standards at every level of business and finance. There is still little suspicion that with already $2 trillion of foreign currency reserves, booming China is capable of writing its own rules which one day everyone else will have to follow.
The West’s fear of the future is boosted by the grim knowledge of its own systemic failures. Indeed 2009 was the year in which many once comfortable and complacent families simply did not know what was going to happen next, just as a billion people in the Third World do not know on this new year’s morning, where their next meal is coming from.
