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WHAT A difference a year can make. None but the most pessimistic jeremiahs could have foreseen the speed and depth of the financial crisis which has engulfed the world. The excesses of free markets, lax regulation and a smattering of fraud are blamed but it may take a lot longer to say definitively what has happened: after all, the precise causes of the Great Depression are still a matter for academic debate some 80 years later.

Meanwhile, we have to live with the consequences. We have gone from the Celtic Tiger to an era of financial fear with the suddenness of a Titanic-style shipwreck, thrown from comfort, even luxury, into a cold sea of uncertainty. Many people have already lost jobs and all or part of their incomes and it appears that many more will do so over the coming year. Many others have also seen their wealth, however large or small, held directly or through pension funds, decimated by share-price collapses and the property crash. While the past always seems to have been a simpler place, not least because we know how things turned out, the present always seems to be more complex because the future is uncertain. And the future now is not just uncertain but has suddenly become a threatening place.