America will soon seem like fond Hollywood memory

For a child of the time, this was entirely true. They had the TV button. They had the glamour button. They had the hydrogen bomb button. They had the button that could devalue your pound, destroy a sovereign foreign policy and turn everything you ever knew into a suburb of a cowpoke town. A button.

Little George Bush has been pushing his buttons, like a rat at a feeding tube, for several weeks now. His republic's Federal Reserve has been pushing the interest rate button with a will. Yet nothing happens. Room service has been cancelled. For a Herodotus of the age, if any, this is interesting. Imperial America is in primal fear, and we must all quail.

The great, soon to be late, Gore Vidal said there was a moment at which the American century ended. Vidal said that when the US of A became the planet's greatest debtor client - I forget the number of trillions - the game was up. He appeared to take satisfaction from that.

I do not. A stock market "correction" implies a recession, over two quarters, from which comes a slump, from which comes a depression, from which comes mass unemployment, and lost homes, and blighted lives, and endemic misery. We left-wing extremists do not, in fact, take much pleasure in being right about capitalism.

Doesn't make us wrong, though. As the last Connollyite Marxist in captivity, I got tired long since of treacly reactionaries telling me that "if only" I had bothered to understand economics I could have been a proper journalist. Just like the ones who warned us all about what happens, as night follows day, inevitably, to an over-priced equities market. Right.

There are certain technical difficulties attending to this sort of column. If this is, in fact, the end of the world as we know it, should I be boring you with Goodhart's law, and with the Lucas critique? It won't keep you, or me, in a job. On the other hand, Professor Goodhart has had fascinating things to say about the herd mentality as it applies to the idiots who try to issue bonds on the back of the flayed spine of a failed bank. Or to, for that matter, a failed Chancellor of the Exchequer.

From whence arises the horror of nationalisation? Mr Darling and Mr Brown, who once dressed to the left, should explain why any madcap scheme will do for Northern Rock, and my taxes, bar that one, above all. Two entire defence budgets have gone into the hole. Now, while the global bond scam does one of its periodic pirouettes, we must do anything except, God save us, nationalise. Right.

Reading some of the Northern Rock copy, and hearing of the august financial institutions shocked to discover that the value of their investments may go down as well as up, I begin to have subversive thoughts. It couldn't be, could it, that the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has no real control over his and our country? Surely you don't mean to tell me that we are run by people with buckets of borrowed money?

We might as well be Americans. If that happened to be our fate, we could always reintroduce Mr Stupid to Mr Economy. They were once old friends. But if the US is about to revisit the Dust Bowl - I suspect it might be likely - a whole planet follows. All of the "liquidity" there is, or ever was, has gone into "the banking system". America has pressed all the buttons, called in all the favours and done the usual thing. No-one is home.

Not in China, certainly, where the unpleasant old men in their elegant, encrusted bunkers are contemplating wads of worthless Yankee paper, a bare $100bn of it, and wondering where, if anywhere, to spread that bet. Consequences will follow.

Russia will take a view of her own. There, the eternal security apparat waits to see how all these cards might fall, and what an energy-starved world won't do for fuel, with a grovelling nudge and a submissive wink, for Comrade-Colonel-Czar Putin, and for his newest appointed Kremlin stooge.

I could dress it up, to make us all feel better in the January rain. Instead, try this. As the comely comedy girls will soon learn to say, down in the beautiful sunlit lowlands of the San Fernando Valley, America is just, like, y'know, so over.

Three facts will follow. First, that the world is just about to come off the dollar, as a trading standard, after a very brief century. There will be chaos. Then the next President of the dying republic will let slip the mangy dogs of war "for election purposes". Such is the guidance.

Secondly, the military power that follows economic power like suds in the wake will diminish, steadily. Get used to the idea of China, Russia, India and Indonesia as the masters now. Very soon the rupee will be your new dollar. And America will soon begin to seem like fond Hollywood memory.

Thirdly, finally, there is what the awesomely tedious economists would term a "technical point". We always had a problem with this one, on my side of the fence. Here goes. If the manipulation of interest rates is the best that capitalism possesses, we - Houston, a first-time buyer, an equity specialist, most human beings - have a problem. The American republic may also have a problem.

It doesn't work. It is the only tool in the box, but for the fixing of your fiscal problem? Be my guest. Attempt to manipulate the ancient art of usury. Yet imagine this, now and then: those Marxist nutters knew how an economy operates.

Which is, more or less, fine. The living detail involves the next person sworn under oath to lay her hands on the buttons, however. The US is not quite, or even remotely, out of this game. An America under economic pressure is liable to lash out, and she demands her predestined share of an imperishable right. Or oil, instead.

The point is tiny. The world is changing overnight. Market turmoil, so called, has yet to play a role in the American presidential races. That is, I think, a great pity. More of a pity is the self-evident fact that the American republic does not possess anyone capable of expressing what is going on, why it matters and why the next President will save the citizens from themselves.

No big deal. All you have to do is press a button. Or understand what the button might signify. Or become the first Marxist ever to lead the government of the United States. From where I sit, that sounds about as likely as someone making a case for the sane use of interest rates, or for nationalisation of a bank upon which people depend.

The great FDR got himself elected, you will remember, because there was a very deep crisis. Solutions were thereafter the keys to his re-election. But as he never said, stuff happens. Most of that involves money.