COMMENT | Radical deglobalisation is happening the world over: the sudden implosion of every country/nation-state, in a rapid-fire Kondratieff Cycle episode of the rise and fall of the economy, of a network of exchanges in the global supply chain of the retail industry, of the destruction of the travel and tourism industry, of manufacturing, mining - of any industry perhaps which requires human interaction and cheap labour of the world's poor.

The word today is "a war we are in", "a battle zone", "makeshift hospitals for the wounded and dying". Symptomatic of a world war. A cataclysm of a different sort and one in which even the most powerful nation on Earth - a least militarily one such as Trump's America - is begging for face masks and ventilators, so that death can be delayed. The nation can expect "the curve flattened" whilst the country deploying armies can do battle with this invincible enemy and to deal with a plague whose cure will only come when perhaps millions have died.

Millions, at least in the US, will lose their jobs by the year's end, or even earlier. How long must employees be furloughed, be given unemployment checks, be helped by the state in a Keynesian manner? Nobody knows. The answer depends on how much of a welfare state way of thinking is deployed in a country whose citizens think that socialism is communism and un-American.

"Unemployment rate" gauged against the points on Wall Street and the runs of the bulls and bears - is a fancy word, masking the human face behind the suffering of the inability to feed the family. To put food on the table, as the Americans would say. A hungry stomach knows no ideology nor fancy words. Crime rate will increase as the unemployed become restless, as survival is the only word the hungry knows, in a post-corporate capitalist world known for its Friedmanian brutal survival of the fittest of cut-throat...