The world's financial system and respiratory pathways have both caught a chill.
Shake hands and spread the heat: good advice in financially robust times, when international business deals are an everyday occurrence. And not so good in times of weakness, when close contact transmits malign influences from business to business, from economy to economy, until the whole world feels the chill.
It’s that season again, when changing weather and smog play havoc with the national respiration. Simultaneously, the oxygen of the international economy — cheap credit — is in short supply, and the world economy is gasping for air. The change of weather heralds a change in health, and the common cold is making its unwelcome rounds.
The UK Independent says that India too has now caught the world’s cold, meaning that the hypothesis of “decoupling”, according to which India, by dint of its enormous domestic economy and relative financial prudence (read: primitivity) was largely insulated from the financial troubles of the West, is now “in tatters”.
In the West it was cheap credit that sustained the consumer-driven boom, and now it is that same cheap credit which has turned costly. From the oxygen that fed the flame, it has become the virus that laid the world low, its consequences jumping economic frontiers with an effortless ease that has everyone mystified, most of all the economists who didn’t quite see this epidemic coming.
Fortunately for the Independent’s rather damp metaphor, the common cold, although it is as common as cheap credit was, is still as profound a mystery as is the world’s financial system. Colds are not caused by one single virus but by a number of them, and they are endlessly mutable, evolving fast and never staying fixed for long enough for medical research to figure out how to stop them. A permanent cure, therefore, is not expected anytime soon.
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Likewise, although credit trouble may have triggered the financial crisis, the real causes are more various. And the solutions offered by the doctors of the economy are as trial-and-error as those offered to fight the cold — studies don’t agree on what works or why, and in what doses.
People are beginning to throw their hands up in temporary defeat and conserve their resources. The less risk they take now, they hope, the better shape they’ll be in to survive what’s starting to look like a prolonged chill. And it’s good that they’re throwing their hands up, because the best way to spread the cold virus is to shake hands.
Cold viruses are hardy and good at jumping from host to host. Not only can they waft through the air, after being expelled in the breath, they also teem in the little mucus samples a host leaves behind everywhere he goes — by means of a handshake, on a doorknob, keyboard, tabletop.
When the Gaia hypothesis was proposed in the 1960s by James Lovelock, scientists laughed it off. How could anyone prove that the planet, both it’s living and inorganic parts, functioned as one organism? Now scientists are less sceptical. And now perhaps someone will suggest that the world’s economic system can also be seen as a total organism. In the globalised world, there is no such thing as a localised illness. It’s worryingly ripe ground for a new layer of practical metaphor.
