There’s further news from the G20 decisiveness talks: individual prescriptions for recovery aren’t meeting with group approval.

Europe demands lower budget deficits, having already created them. The U.S. warns against pushing exports instead of domestic demand, having as it does the biggest domestic demand on Earth. Continued stimulus risks bondholder revolt. Relying on exports leaves the world prone to trade wars. In a statement released after their talks ended, the G20 pledged to “safeguard recovery,” yet pursue “credible, growth-friendly measures to deliver fiscal sustainability.”

And in a small former farmhouse in south-west France, your correspondent read all of this and decided that the Order of the Day must be IABATO: ‘It’s all bollocks, and that’s official”.

The Slog posted something along these lines a week ago, but suffice to repeat here that globalism is never going to work….for the same reason that the EU is never going to work. There are just too many national economies at different stages of the growth cycle for anyone or anything ever to come up with a solution that pleases even half of the interested parties.

Surely much better then to let regional economies work in their own way, and look for individual mutual benefit from other economies able to trade with them efficiently. Because the planetary formula thing just aint working.

I can do little better than quote Venkatraman Anantha-Nageswaran, who helps manage about $140 billion in assets as global chief investment officer at Bank Julius Baer & Co. in Singapore. “We need to accept that all of us cannot simultaneously grow our way out of trouble.”

Well said that man. And he added: “The world may end up in a period of sub-potential growth for two or three years”.

Do you know, I think he’s very probably right.