No two financial crises are the same. The next one will not be like the last one. But there will be a next one and, as the monetary medication begins to be withdrawn, it draws nearer. 

Why were the professionals so wrong about last year's election? After 12 months of thinking about this, my conclusion is that it was because they had not read Jurgen Habermas's seminal book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). Mr. Habermas was writing mainly about the 18th and 19th centuries, but his insight was a universally applicable one. Often, historical changes in attitudes, behaviour and politics are rooted in changes to the structure of the public sphere itself.

In the 1962 Japanese sci-fi classic King Kong vs Godzilla, the two giant monsters fight to a stalemate atop Mount Fuji. I have been wondering for some time when the two giants of American social media would square up for what promises to be a comparably brutal battle. Finally, it began last month — and where else but on Twitter?

One of many pathologies of a small world is groupthink. I arrived in London shortly after the Las Vegas massacre. I encountered unanimity, right across the political spectrum. Americans are crazy, I was repeatedly told. How can you live in a country where such things are possible?

Even if thick to the point of educational sub-normality, these young gentlemen would attend either Oxford or Cambridge. They would then be given one of the following jobs:

1. Estate manager and courtier (eldest son).

2. Foreign Office or Treasury mandarin (brightest son).

3. Cabinet minister (most extrovert son).

4. Governor of [insert Caribbean island] (youngest son).

5. BBC director-general (Left-wing son).

Shortly after the election, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder, dismissed as “a pretty crazy idea” the notion that fake news might have decided the contest in Trump’s favour. Last week he had to admit that he regretted those words.

The world itself is not in a globalist mood. Brexit is about reasserting sovereignty, above all over immigration. Angela Merkel was reelected as German chancellor on Sunday, but her party’s share of the vote was reduced, mainly because she lost control of Germany’s borders two years ago. And Trump himself clings to his election promise to build a wall along the US-Mexican border, as well as to exclude from the United States the citizens of mainly Muslim countries associated with terrorism. 

It seems like the craziest idea in modern American political history. A Republican president, whose party controls both houses of Congress and who enjoys enduring popularity among Republican voters, is playing footsie with the Democrats. The ghastly possibility is dawning on Trump’s most ardent supporters on the right that he might be contemplating outright defection, to become the first bipartisan president in American history.

In all the coverage of the Trump administration’s fraught interactions with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, it has been easy to miss the potentially more consequential interplay unfolding across town: that between Mueller’s team and Congress.

Donald Trump campaigned to disentangle the United States from a war he claimed he had opposed. Steve Bannon suggested Andrew Jackson as a role model: a man who fought his battles at home. Yet, a year after Trump first used the phrase “America First,” he finds himself reading from the same old playbook, increasing the US presence in Afghanistan, firing admirals for collisions in the distant Strait of Malacca.