It may take another spell of convulsion and distress before America's defiant spendthrifts become the "quiescent" savers Lord Overstone and Mr Roach would like to see.
Back in 1837, Lord Overstone, a British economist, described the economy's "established cycle" from a "state of quiescence" through "growing confidence...overtrading, convulsion, distress" finally "ending again in quiescence".
But this convulsion feels too powerful to permit the survival of the ancien regime.
Latvia has a decent prime minister, Valdis Dombrovskis, and a functioning if precarious coalition government.But a political convulsion has now upended this picture.
Yet, as he admitted, he was seldom present at "a single accidental convulsion of history".
And the consequence of failure could be the very upheaval that Chinese leaders have struggled so hard to avoid since the convulsion of 1989.The terms of China's accession to the WTO are more far-reaching than those set for any other new member of the trading organisation or its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.
But before the government plunges into another constitutional convulsion, it needs to meet several conditions.The first and most important proviso is that regional assemblies in England should not lead to an increase in the overall burden of government.
When the smoke clears, my bet is that the consensus will be that securitization did a bit to encourage lax lending and to discourage renegotiation, but that securitization was hardly the only — or even the prime — villain in the great housing convulsion.
Mr Primakov, for all his past Soviet loyalties (see article), is nothing if not adept at changing tunes.The most immediate worry, however, is that this expensive political peace will be short-lived and the government's learning-curve soon broken by a social convulsion.
That is important, because the world is on the downslope of the great demographic convulsion of the past few centuries.
Many will ask how a single day-trader could possibly have been allowed to generate $200m of selling orders, over a fifth of the daily volume in the contract he favoured, during a period of known market convulsion without having been blocked by one party or another.
