i wonder what marx (karl not groucho) would make of the 'credit crunch'? I'm no political scientist but i dimply recall from my A levels that marx predicted the eventual collapse of capitalism. when my ex-wife was a girl her father was a commodity broker: she little understood the working of the market so worried that one day she would come home and find the garden piled high with coffee bean, precious metals or barrels of oil. i thought the idea of the market economy was that supply and demand controlled trade and prices. its a simple concept; i produce tea, a wholesaler buys my tea and sells it to a retailer for more than he paid for it who in turn sells it to you for even more. if there are lots of people producing, dealing and retailing tea it brings down the price - if my harvest fails the price goes up. but the power of stock markets and international banking has, it seems at least to my uneducated gaze, have distorted this simple equation. the exchanges are not now dealing in actual commodities but in virtual ones and in something we might call 'confidence'.

a question: if all the bankers and brokers in the world were 'disappeared' overnight - would the world collapse? it has been said that the price of oil has risen NOT because of any shortage but instead because of speculative virtual buying and selling. at the end of the day, we are paying more for our goods, our fuel, and our credit so that bankers (i always thought this was rhyming slang..) can get richer without actually doing anything.