"The history of Europe started from ancient Greece and ended with contemporary Greece"--this may be the words that our descendents will learn in school.

When I look at the Greek debt problem and the related sovereignty risk discussion about Spain and Portugal, I can not but feel that the world economic and political system is now reaching its limits. Intervals of financial collapses are becoming shorter and shorter--the IT bubble, the sub-prime mortgage bubble and now the "sovereign risk" bubble--as if the world economy is in the death pang.

A financial collapse would not mean the end of economy; as long as the human-being want to consume goods and service, and as long as they are produced, the economy never ceases to exist. Nevertheless, if next financial collapse hits the real economy very hard, the world economy will drastically shrink, and we will have to start from a low point of possibly five to ten years ago.

The coming collapse may be immense, because it involves the "sovereign risk". It may spread to the United Kingdom, the U.S. and Japan.
Will it mean a total shift in the world order? Will the rule by the Europeans and the U.S., which has been continuing since the time of colonialism and the Industrail Revolution, come to an end? Or the economies of the BRICs countries will be hit even harder, bringing them back to the status of twenty something years ago?

Even more importantly, has the democratic system, which has already changed into populism with permanently growing expenditure for social expenses and ever widening financial deficits, reached its limits?

What is more, is the "managed currency system" with its paper money finally losing its efficacy, when the guarantor of its value, the state, is losing trust of the market? If so, even the Keynesian economic policy, that is bigger governmental expenditure during depression, will not be effective enough for saving out the economy.

And if the managed currency system be replaced by something new, will it be the revival of the gold standard system? Probably not, because the gold standard system is prone to stem quick economic growth, and because it has a tendency to make permanent the gap between haves and have-nots.

So, it is now a very crucial time to watch. Let us survive to witness perhaps the turning point of world history.