UK: Smith on Economics - The world heads for the cliff edge.

The global economy is teetering on the brink of the worst recession of the post-war period. Chaos may be only a short step away, says David Smith.

There is always a time, in every economic crisis, when the mood turns from complacency to something approaching blind panic. It happened in the last recession for most businesses in September 1990. Having gone off on holiday amid a few gathering clouds, managers returned to find that the economy, in a phrase I have used before, had fallen off a cliff.