A local accountants' recent bulletin summed up the business environment at the grass roots, in much the same way that it appears at the top of the economic tree.

Many of their clients appear to be trading very well, surviving the economic down turn, and producing good profits while an equal number are suffering terribly with low order books, unmanageable debts and prospects for imminent collapse only staved off by remarkably low interest rates.

The game of two halves:

The first half could be as follows. George W Bush (a possibly less than principled president) called an emergency meeting of the G20.  He had good reason to do so and (as was probably incorrectly attributed to him), he observed that "this sucker is going down" - meaning the global economy.

The next summit was hosted by the less than simple, but equally confused, Gordon Brown, whose current alleged difficulty with eyesight is possibly impairing his judgement in all sorts of different ways.  Out of this we got a semblance of order this spring and a commitment to hold the act together.

Perhaps the end of the first half is encapsulated in the charismatic Barack Obama's hosting of the G20 summit in Pittsburgh.  Some may argue that Obama's willingness to quote from Thomas Paine (the uncelebrated but hugely influential creator of the American constitution) may bode well for a more principled economic global environment in the future.

The first half ends with a remarkable three-stage commitment around which the G20 will try to hold the world together. The obvious corollary to this is of course that "divided we fall, united we stand".

The team talk to the opposing sides in this game of two halves is now under way. Finance ministers and central bankers reporting back to their respective governments realise that there are huge fault lines throughout the whole of the social fabric of Western economies. Perhaps they have created another bubble in the value of equities and even possibly corporate bonds?  We also await the true outcome of a change of political direction in various parts of the world (not least in Germany and the UK during the course of 2010).

October 2009, Patrick McIntosh