is staging its own JG Ballard tribute performance.

There's not much fun in seeing people lose their jobs and the country being plunged back into recession (because we'll be brought down with it).

Might make for interesting news, but a lot of lives will be messed up by politicians failing to do their jobs properly.

It is a bit wrong. But I think schadenfreude is pretty much a universal human trait.

more understandable if it was the first time and a meltdown would provide the kick up the arse required to ensure it never happened again. But recession just follows recession and nothing changes.

and investment bankers and their ilk that got hurt I could perhaps enjoy it.

However in a couple of years when we look back at this sorry mess, they'll still be rolling in wealth while a lot more of us will be even more concerned about pensions, housing affordability, jobs for ourselves, jobs for those starting out to work, jobs for those who still years away from starting work, how we're going to pay for food and electricity and gas and all the other necessities of life, never mind going out to buy luxuries.

I don't understand any of it, particularly the apparent vulnerability (which, it seems, is decided by ratings agencies who are accountable to nobody) of what Donald Rumsfeld might have called "Old Southern Europe".

Andrew Collins, in a lengthy review of the crisis on his own blog today, says that Spain "doesn't really make anything". How, then, do we explain the 20 billion in exports to the UK alone? Or the fact that four of the top ten construction firms in the world are Spanish, while the UK can only manage one in the top 20? Man cannot live by Russell Hobbs kettles alone.

The current (originally Merkel-driven) canard that southern Europe's only role in the world economy is to be a vast drain on all our financial resources, populated as the region is by countless millions of sangría-, chianti- or ouzo-swilling slackers, who all owe the very clothes on their backs to the largesse of the busy-bee burghers of Darlington and Düsseldorf is - to say the least - simplistic.

... anarchy...

it'll never happen, but when did we decide to become slaves to the ever failing system. I may be simple (and am often confused as such) but why not just print more money, lower the value of everything and learn to get along nicely...

otherwise, whats left for us poor plebs in 30 years that rely on pensions, whilst fat cats and politicians remain affluent....

pensioner anarchy i say, ha!

With television channels repeating the same stories 24 hours a day, and the radio, and the internet, I think there's almost a subliminal hysteria permanent in the back of our minds caused by this constant barrage of information that ain't good for any of us at all. When I were a lad in the 70's the only time we had Breaking News, or a 'Newsflash', was when very serious incidents occurred i.e., an IRA bomb, not every ten minutes e.g. when the new line-up of Strictly Come Dancing is announced (seriously, that was a Breaking News story once). It used to make me nervous once every six months let alone every ten minutes as it is nowadays. Charlie Brooker said the problem with watching BBC Breaking News is you can't go to bed until everyone's died. Which is why I try not to watch it for too long and keep a sense of proportion about things. Going to lay down in a dark room now.

Even if the Euro goes tits up,it doesn't really matter, as some say the world will end in 2012 anyway!

If your "anti-capitalism" the reality is that the only thing which will turn people off from the system that you seek to overthrow is financial collapse. Unfortunately the danger of financial collapse is nowhere near a big enough threat to turn anyone off the system.

The nightmare scenario is always there though, just waiting to come out; that there's a collapse, the pain and misery that goes with it inevitably arrives, and the capitalist system emerges smiling out of the other side, without any noticeable dents in it whatsoever. this is basically what has happened from 2008 onwards.

This socialist desire for a collapse in the system is quite different from the spectator fantasy that the OP seems to be experiencing though, which I can't find much justification for.

I wouldn't want to see us slip in to a major recession, no. However, I would have liked to have seen the government allowing one of the major banks to fail. Clearly the bail out did nothing. RBS and Lloyds both posted billion pound losses this week but bonuses are still being paid...

Because unless you are already wealthy and financially secure (like most of the cabinet) you are going to get stuffed. The victims will be everyday folks like you and me, who will lose jobs, lose houses, have to pay huge interest rates if they can borrow money at all, and will have services and pensions cut to reduce government debt in an effort to reassure the credit rating agencies.

If the big crash comes the bankers will be embarrassed, and maybe have to keep this years Aston Martin for two years. Loads of us will be hammered for years. Remember, when they banks foreclose they sell off the assets cheap to people who have money. So the rich will be able to buy our houses, businesses, antiques (whatever you have to sell) at rock bottom prices - and will still own them when the economy recovers. It will be a massive wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.

Is that really amusing? It is disaster porn. Chaos is not fun unless you are "resiliant" which usually means rich and armed.

Sorry if I am being a bit strong. Having struggled through the past few years I really want the economy to recover, bank lending rates to come down (what they charge us, not the central rate), and house prices to stabilise. Then I might be able to sleep at night without worrying about keeping a roof over my family's head. The last thing I want is more financial chaos.

It is wrong, but it is an understandable feeling which is fed by the rolling news which, I think, de-personalises everything.

The 24-hour always promises but never, or hardly ever, delivers. It is always sensationalist. To keep viewers' attention it exaggerates the importance of every little thing and also spends a lot of time on disastrous what-if scenarios, and when their worst-case scenarios don't happen a part of you feels cheated.

You can see that when there is a disaster and in the first fart of reports there are predictions of 100s dead which then get scaled down and the presenters have to keep saying "but the body count might go up after police searches" and try not to sound too hopeful about it.

Trouble is there isn't one. We old quasi-Marxists were initally gloating a bit, saying 'We told you so', but the reality is not exactly that we're in the same boat (there is no boat any more), but that we're over the side lashed to a psychopath who's holding the only buoyancy device and it's not able to support us both.

I am writing as someone that has been directly affected by the crunch, in that I used to live in Spain for 5 years, up until a couple of years ago, and we had to return to the UK to find work again, and rent a property. Two years later and we are still in a rented house, and our 15 years worth of equity that we put into the house in Spain has virtually disappeared, and it is at the mercy of our Spanish bank, who would have repossessed it by now, except that there is something of a queue. The thing is, I'm not bitter, but we are taking a pragmatic approach to working and building again. To quote Jack and Diane - "starting from zero got nothing to lose"

And since the crash I have done more than most people I know to try and understand and learn about what went wrong. I have watch Capitalism a Love Story, Inside Job, The Ascent of Money, and read various books including The Big Short. Coupled with reading news stories and trying to get to grips with the economics of it, I consider myself better informed than most.

So, reconsidering my OP, perhaps I am looking for the big crash, the thing that finally means a radical rethink, and a change to the systems that I know understand a little more than I did before 2008. I don't think it can happen, as everything seems too intertwined, but the realisation of how much banks and governments can control populations through the supply of money, does make me feel like I want it all to come crashing down. The problem is, it is the people that are hit hardest, not the fuckers in charge.

The USA has been rated AA+ instead of AAA! WE'RE ALL DOOMED!!!

*confused face*

Obviously in spite of my spirited efforts trying to understand this nonsense (which involved trying to read books like John Lanchesters "Whoops" and a few others) I genuinely have no real idea of what all of this actually means, beyond "the tea party seem to be determined to wreck America don't they?"

*goes back to look at otters*

No it is not "wrong" - I mean, I have really enjoyed watching the shit hit the fan this past week, but that's because I'm not a have, I'm a have-not, so my delight is motivated by nothing more than class envy and financial envy.

On the other hand, it is wrong, because the people who are behind this mess will not be the ones most deeply affected; it'll be the "little guy". Again. But it may be the start of a new paradigm.

Hopefully this will spell the start of the end of the dominance of Thatcherite laissez faire monetarist policies that took over here, then the US, then the rest of West. The idea of self-regulating markets has been proven to be utter horse-shit.

that since the events of 2008 it has been a constant day by day litany of failed businesses, job losses, cutbacks and countries going bust, I kind of figured that we were still experiencing the first crash, quite aside from staring into the face of another.

I feel that there are people/institutions that trade on the back of our ignorance by betting correctly on currency movement, bonds and equity behaviour. They bet correctly because they operate with such large trading positions that they can influence markets by their actions. And then they become extremely rich, no matter what.

Trading conditions have been made so difficult to fathom that these actions are tantamount to insider trading - and at at the very least, unethical practice.

If we do plunge into a crisis, this might help us understand a bit more who is exploiting who (and how). Then we might get some Murdoch-like comeuppance to those that have been playing the rest of us like a fiddle for so long. There is an appetite for it.

....you've got your chaos in Tottenham.
That has as much to do with financial deprivation as anything else.

.....but idiots without jobs and little legitimate way of earning a living.
Hence: the short term manifestation of looting.
And the long term, and far, far more insidious crime (it's brought many parts of London to its knees) of drug dealing and drug taking.