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Never before in modern times has so much of the world been simultaneously hit by a confluence of economic and financial turmoil such as we are now living through.

The trends that are shaping the twenty-first-century world embody both promise and peril. Globalization, for example, has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty while contributing to social fragmentation and a massive increase in inequality, not to mention serious environmental damage.

Fortunes are made, and disappear, over the lifetime of a single generation. Today, a person in essence takes his wealth from society just for the duration of his or her lifetime. The next generation has to create it anew.

We are inheriting the worst financial system since the Depression. We're inheriting a situation - when people go back and study major banking crises a quarter century from now, the one that America developed in 2007 and 2008 is going to be one of those crises.

Prosperity has brought complications. Our lives are busier, faster, more stressful. They're nostalgic for a simpler, slower time.

Unfortunately, in a recession, the people who suffer the most aren't the rich, but the wanna-be rich and the poor.

For many Europeans the next decade looks to be filled with threats rather than opportunities.

Every day it seems more likely that we are destined - or should one say doomed? - to replay the disastrous economic history of the 1930s.

Ironically, for the mega-rich, recession brings with it the ability to live well at a lower cost and with less of a hassle.

Unlike economics, whose sole preoccupation in our finance-obsessed era is the near-term profit motive, history offers a way to place our tiny lifespans in a narrative that spans dozens of generations - perhaps even reaching into a future where capitalism is no longer our dominant form of economic organization.