By Lord Anthony

A highly recommended read is U of T's Thomas Homer-Dixon's "The Ingenuity Gap".

He identifies how our ingenuity has managed to cope admirably with challenges since our beginnings,

but those days are gone. We can no longer handle the outcome of the models and systems we have designed.

There is an ingenuity gap, and it's widening.

Three areas are frightening to read. Our bodies can't be micromanaged as a bunch of slave-systems to "The Brain".
Nor can our environment. Biology, forests and rivers don't work that way, but we're afraid to admit it, regardless of Al Gore's ideology.
But what is spookily topical is his analysis of the huge 1987 stock-market "correction" of Monday October 19th, in the chapter named "Glimpsing the Abyss".

Bottom line?

Nobody had a clue what was happening. Vast quantities of financial data were being fired around the planet, panicking investors and brokers.
The traditional ways of let's give it the weekend, let's meet later this week, let's have coffee, had been trumped by the all-business young cyber-turks whose bosses were embarrassed to admit they hadn't a clue what their subordinates were doing.
It seems the US Federal Reserve Bank under Alan Greenspan did an admirable job of heading off complete collapse of the world as we know it.

My rural paradigm-nightmare for this is my favourite rural market at Keady Ont. where everyone is selling the fruits of their labour but no-one is buying. 

The inevitable nasty outcome would be all that endeavour and genius, produce and goods being bought up at fire-sale prices by the worst kind of opportunistic cockroaches.

Next week, no market. Screw you. You now buy from us, get used to it.

…."Many specialist firms surviving Monday ended the day with stock inventories several multiples higher
than their average holdings, all of which had to be paid within five business days. Prestigious firms turned to their normal lenders, similarly prestigious New York banks, only to find that the banks were not interested in lending…"

What makes ordinary people think banks will support them in tough times? Should taxpayers be cutting some slack for banks whose response if the shoe was on the other foot… foreclosure?