A fascinating story is unfolding in the US. The bill to bail out financial markets has failed and must now be renegotiated, and the reasons for the failure appears to be, in large part, disaffected Republicans whose constituency seems to be small business. The reasoning is that small business pays for its mistakes, therefore big business should too, and that anything else would be "socialism."
Well, there it is: the "s" word. America seems to fear the idea of needing help more than the consequences of being allowed to fail. This marks a serious blow to the nation's self-image, one from which they won't quickly recover. Of course, most of us would like to see fat-cat bankers brought down a peg or two, or three, but it's a mistake to think that we can manage without them. A healthy vulture population means a healthy animal kingdom.
Europe generally has managed this kind of crisis thinking with much less fuss (witness the spate of consolidations yesterday across the continent). And surely no-one in the UK seriously thinks that any other flavour of UK government would have acted differently. Faster, perhaps, but not in differently in essence.
So we may finally end up with bonus ceilings, limits on the self-indulgence of financiers, control and scrutiny at a level that most people would think has been missing for decades. But it takes a proper crisis for it to happen. Now is a good time to be looking at the whole structure of growth and capitalism, as it appears, naked, before the planet's scrutiny. Perhaps our meteor has arrived, and dinosaur banking/finance/capitalism are over. Maybe it takes a whole generation to die before we can make progress towards sustainable finance and commerce.