How was the recovery for you? You know, the one between the politicos in Washington putting their narrow partisan views aside and reaching a historic US debt agreement and the realisation that Italy has borrowed too much and the man in charge of the country hates the man the markets trust.
Yes, the rally that lasted about 20 minutes, between America going to sleep on Tuesday and Japan waking up on Wednesday was short-lived even by modern standards. Now we head into another weekend full of uncertainty, fear and loathing, with the realisation that the only thing growing in the world is not the economy, but the debt. This crisis may last a few weeks at least because Barack Obama, the US president, is going on holiday and the Tea Party people are stopping for tea or whatever they do.
Even David Cameron, the British prime minister, has gone on holiday, although he forgot to pack any socks, something that The Times chided him for in a leader. Mind you, the Teflon man of British politics has looked rather leaden-footed and accident prone in the past few weeks. He needed something to get the press off his back, so it was perhaps better that they focused on his feet.
But a day or so after the historic event, it turns out the US debt deal was not such a good deal after all. That's a pity because not long ago everybody thought that the lessons of the Great Depression had been learnt. Ben Bernanke, the fellow who spent more time studying it than John Pierpont Morgan, was appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve. He decreed that the Great Depression was prolonged because instead of loosening credit markets, lenders tightened them, and everybody agreed.
Yes, that was one lesson, but there's another lesson that nobody paid any attention to because it is too painful to bear. When you have a lot of debt, you need to repay it. How do you do this? You stop spending or you start earning more, preferably both. But ever since Reaganomics it is firmly believed that to kick-start growth, you lower taxes. Therefore it is unthinkable to raise taxes, even for the very rich, who have been given colossal tax breaks in the past 10 years and now pay about the same each year to the US Treasury as the men selling hotdogs on the corner of 5th Avenue.
This shibboleth may be tosh. According to research by Moody's Investors Service a year ago, give the rich a tax cut and rather than spend it, thus boosting the economy, they save it. This might help the stockmarket, but nobody else.
So, you can't raise taxes. Just letting the Bush tax cuts expire next year would save US$3.8 trillion (Dh13.95tn) over 10 years, say analysts, but will Mr Obama dare? Doubtful.
Can you cut spending instead? No, course you can't, because you need to stimulate the economy. Cutting spending is absolutely the worst thing you can do, where have you been the past few years? We don't cut spending, we print money and give it away in bundles to whoever wants it, except the poor of course. They don't deserve it and they'd only spend it.
So a deal has been reached to raise the debt ceiling, which means we can borrow more money in the hope that one day, when we finally have to pay it off, we shall no longer be in office.
Think things are better in Europe? Think again. The euro zone may have enjoyed a few moments out of the spotlight, but now Spain and especially Italy are back under the cosh. The markets don't like them and are punishing them for their profligacy. It's funny that it has taken the markets until now to work this out. I would have thought that all those clever people with pointy heads and fat salaries might have realised some time before a country's debt exceeded its annual GDP that it had a bit of a debt issue.
The lesson of the Great Depression, the austerity years in Britain, South America's Lost Decade in the 1980s and Japan's Lost Decade in the 1990s is this (apart from the fact that coming up with clever names seems to have stopped with the title of a Scott Fitzgerald story): too much debt is nasty and takes a lot of time to pay back. You need to spend less and earn more.
Of course the rich should pay more taxes. They are the only ones who believe in the trickle-down effect, nobody else does. If they don't like a tax hike, go take a hike where nobody pays taxes, such as Nicaragua or Sierra Leone. And while the rich must pay more, the poor must expect less. I'm afraid that's the end of many of the things that you used to get for free.
Yes folks, today's lesson is that debt and diets are a nasty business, and they take time to work. But nobody lost weight by eating more. Now I'm going on holiday.