The UK's Guardian newspaper, of Edward Snowden leaks fame, just published a good overview of the world's recent financial missteps titled The world economic order is collapsing and this time there seems no way out.

Some excerpts:

The heart of the economic disorder is a world financial system that has gone rogue. Global banks now make profits to a extraordinary degree from doing business with each other. As a result, banking's power to create money out of nothing has been taken to a whole new level.

The emergence of a global banking system means central banks are much less able to monitor and control what is going on. And because few countries now limit capital flows, in part because they want access to potential credit, cash generated out of nothing can be lent in countries where the economic prospects look superficially good. This provokes floods of credit, rather like the movements of refugees.

The false boom that follows seems to justify the lending. Property prices rise. Companies and households grow overconfident about their prospects and borrow freely. Economies surge well above their trend growth rates and all seems well until something – a collapse in property or commodity prices – unravels the whole process. The money floods out as quickly as it flooded in, leaving bust banks and governments desperately picking up the pieces.

The result, says the Guardian, is a crisis in three acts. Act one was the 2008 bursting of the housing/derivatives bubble that nearly wiped out the global banking system. Act two was the 2011 euro crisis in which the idea that Greek, Italian and Spanish bonds were equivalent to German paper was abruptly discredited, again nearly wiping out the big banks.

Act three, now in progress, is the bursting of the emerging markets bubble, led by China (great stat: “China manufactured more cement from 2010-13 than the US had produced over the entire 20th century.”)