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Marco, No offence intended; indeed, the global economic crisis has been draped in what Edward Said would call ‘mythic language’ from day 1 which, irrespective of what Mervyn King may have believed about the animal spirits of the market in 2008, began on August 6, 2007 (Iwaisako, 2010: 353), when PNB Paribas had to suspend three of its hedge funds because “it had become impossible to calculate the net asset value of the funds (Greenlaw, Hatzius, Kashyap, and Shin 2008)”. All analyses through formal media channels to the contrary, no government, private sector or supranational institution actor is interested in analysing the crisis from an objective systemic viewpoint (supposing that were possible). All of the above are interested in constructing a simulacrum, a performance of the crisis that most effectively controls the hinterland of knowledge production about the crisis and most closely flatters their positionality. One of the more interesting examples of this was the invention of the ‘shadow banking system’ after a Jackson Hole conference in 2007, which was eagerly seized on by official and media commentators the world over to explain how no-one could have seen the crisis coming - a pure act of will and imagination that has few equals in terms of its spontaneity and global spread. Long story short, you are no more likely to get any objective analysis/prediction from Angela Merkel concerning the crisis, than you can predict the weather by hanging a piece of sea-weed outside your bedroom window. Even the threats and warnings of imminent critical happenings have supplementary motivation, such as Merkel’s warnings about the possible collapse of the system as a tool to push the Bundestag to vote for the new all-singing, all-dancing, doomed-to-fail EFSF. Our lovely, shiny-faced PM David Cameron loves to talk about austerity and global debt crises, not because this says anything realistic or useful about how to analyse and tackle the crisis, but because it blames a social welfare system that the conservatives in our country loathe and it’s an attempt to divert attention from the fact that 50.5% of the UK government deficit is down to past and current attempts to rescue his chums in our banking system - if the crisis hadn't happened, the tories would have had to invent one to justify what they were going to do anyway. Dr Jon Cloke Lecturer/Research Associate Geography Department Loughborough University Loughborough LE11 3TU Office: 01509 228193 Mob: 07984 813681