So... who else had the Observer yesterday... and enjoyed this?:

In short, within three years the world economy will be in a significant downturn, and the correction process for the Anglo-Saxon economies will last as long as a decade.

Pay, and therefore living standards, will have to adjust to the effect of Chinese competition. Stock markets will collapse, house prices in the over-extended markets of the UK and the US will fall by up to 50 per cent, and major investment banks and other financial institutions will go bust.

Jim Mellon's piece reads like a kind of economic Revelations, in which the Asian economic Beast will come and rip the heart from our beloved economy, leaving us all staring at a decade, at least, of subsistence living... nothing to put on our iPods. It's based on five principles of pain - growing Anti-Americanism, fiscal and social deficits, China's growth, consumer-business-government debt, and environmental stress, and it makes for compelling reading. He ends the article by hinting that, even in the direst moments of economic meltdown, there are ways for the canny to profit from the misery. But how? How do we do that? Guess what? You could always write a book. That's the thing about apocalyptic visions... there's always a book.