Nobody has recognised that the destructive process had been encouraged by the US authorities and the IMF in particular. This was done tacitly by guaranteeing the loans of US investors in Mexico and the corrupt encouragement of unaffordable borrowing by countries such as Russia and Argentina, and was in fact an officially orchestrated criminal conspiracy to induce chronically weak economies to incur debt at unsustainably high interest rates, thereby permitting Western speculators and financial institutions to make super profits as long as the IMF obligingly propped up the local exchange rate against the dollar. An action that has contributed greatly to mass impoverishment in Russia, Argentina and elsewhere.
The disclosure in December 2003 that the Italian based food multinational Parmalat had a 4 billion Euro hole in its balance sheet appeared at first as a simple case of theft by the group's top management. However, it subsequently emerged that a significant part of the company's losses (accumulated over thirty years) resulted from political favours provided to government leaders around the world.
What makes any financial downturn more drastic is the financial well being of the mass of individual citizens is now directly linked to the performance of the financial markets . The resulting threat to the retirement incomes of so many is a social and political problem of potentially catastrophic proportions.
It is important to recognise the enormous and growing power of corporations to affect economic and social conditions in an increasingly deregulated world.
In the real world of intensifying competitive struggle against a background of dwindling opportunies for making genuine profits few corporate leaders can doubt the need for continued duplicity in describing their financial performance to the investing public.
The unswerving determination of the dominant political interests in the Western world since the 1970s to resist any change in the global economic order and structures of power that might weaken their own supremacy and disproportionate share of the world's wealth.
Since the advent of the French Revolution of 1789 (where the collapse of the French monarchy was due to economic failure) the general tendency for Western elites was to make at least minimum concession to those forces that might otherwise have unleashed more profound social and political upheaval.
Thus, over the succeeding 150 years traditional monarchical or aristocratic societies gave ground to bourgeois revolutions and to the progressive extension of voting rights to the whole population.
The present intransigence of the current ruling elite is in the direct contrast to the spirit of liberal pragmatism which enabled the previous ruling elite to adjust to change through the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth. This may in turn be attributable to the success of the preceding post-war boom that led the vast majority of the public to believe in the system's capacity to deliver sustained improvements in their living standards.
This striking rigidity is imposed through the increasingly assertive dominance of corporate interests with their vast financial resources in the control of the political process and hence over the actions and pronouncements of public bodies (such as the World Bank) and the realisation that any moves to water down their immense privileges would lend to effective demise of the structures - particularly those of the financial markets - on which their essentially parasitic power is based.
Any illusions that the ruling elite were incapable of duplicity should have been dispelled with the realisation of the complicity of both the magnates of Wall Street and the administrations in Washington in the crime of Enron and World Com.
The fact that the Bush administration was prepared, in the midst of such a huge financial crisis, both to implement a massive tax cut (benefiting the rich) and launch a costly and unprovoked war in Iraq, suggest a regime utterly heedless of public welfare and willing to do anything either to gain a short term reprieve or to try and distract public attention from what is happening.
The most chilling reflection on these manifestations of degeneracy is that a force indistinguisable from organised crime may have gained effective control of the world's most powerful governments.
The most spectacular and best documented was the scandal of the newly deregulated US Savings and Loan Industry in the 1980s, which involved an unprecendented orgy of fraudulent lending and bankruptcy in the which the family of President George H. W. Bush was significantly implicated and which culminated in a bail-out instigated by the same president in 1989 ultimately costing the US taxpayer some 1.4 trillion dollars.
Further evidence for believing that a criminal infiltration of the US government may indeed be a reality is provided by the fact that in 2001 the second Bush administration sought to limit international restraints on money laundering. Such actions are also consistent with the failure of US and other Western leaders to act vigorously to bring the perpetrators of crimes such as those at Enron to justice.
Likewise it is hard to explain official unconcern at the threat to economic and social stability posed by maintaining such a ruinous policy as free flow of international capital except in terms of high level connivance at fraud. The continued insistence of Washington imposing this facility on weak economies, where it can only perpetuate ruin, can only be understood as an effective conspiracy of financial concerns willing, and able, to pursue their own interests at the expense of those of the public.
For even if it is now accepted by Western leaders that the problem of deepening global chaos cannot be ignored any longer, their response appears to be totally incoherent. In this fantasy world the current problem of global disorder is defined as one of "failed states" which are seen as having proved incapable of establishing or maintaining the minimum elements of order and stability compatible with the needs of modern society. The solution, it is now being suggested, must be to reimpose some form of imperial hegemony of the stronger nation-states over the weak or collapsed ones.
What is most astonishing about such proposals is that they constitute a rejection of the fundamental principles of modern international relations. (i.e. Philip Bobbitt's "The shield of Achilles" and Robert Cooper "The New Liberal Imperialism" in the Observer 7 April 2002.)
It may thus not be too fanciful to suppose that the ruling oligarchy in Washington is trying to create a climate in which military conflict of one kind or another is considered a normal state of affairs and where consequently normal legal processes and human rights can be suspended in a more or less permanent state of emergency.
It may be asked how long it will be before the irresponsible and parasitic forces that dominate the system effectively kill the body on which they feed.
Regrettably the average man (or woman) is or has been more occupied with preserving or improving their own place on earth without giving sufficient thought to where all this super abundance is coming from and where it might lead.
Some consideration also must be given to whether a conspiracy of such malignancy does exist and whether this is merely out of control or whether it is following a carefully planned design for chaos and ultimate global power.