Of course there’ve been alarm bells ringing out for some time now. You’ve got to start asking serious questions when our top investment bankers start turning up at their work dressed in garb that one might more commonly associate with Hoxton wannabes. Furthermore, just look at Reaganism in the early 1980s, with its freely-flowing credit fuelled economy, and see how this created a climate whereby galleries, studios and art collecting flourished in New York’s East Village. Same model, just a different decade – and sadly it always ends in tears. Where the money markets lead, the Arts tend to follow not too far behind. In London, we were treated to the dubious talents of Tracy Emin, Damien Hirst and a new form of patronage in White Cube and Saatchi. Two decades earlier New York was buzzing with stories about Jean Michel-Basquiat, Julian Schnabel and Francesco Clemente et al. At least one of the aforementioned appeared on the front cover of Time Magazine no less! (Jean Michel-Basquiat – barefoot and dressed in a $1,000 pin-striped stockbrokers’ suit – dig the symbolism daddyo!) The parallels between then and now are breathtakingly similar.

I was in Shoreditch at the weekend. Plastered about billboards, and on telephone kiosks in said locality, were posters for a nightclub – “The Last Days of Decadence”. Were he alive today, 80s movie mogul John Hughes would have felt right at home with this vibe. We’re living in the last days of decadence and most people are not cool with this idea. But we should feel optimistic, because after so much banality we’re at the turning of the tides now, and I fully expect the next few years to deliver no shortage of great music from the bedrooms of decaying high-density social housing and artworks that are (for a welcome change) politically charged, conceptually rigorous and gutsy.

As for our Creative Economy – well, surely it’s just about intellectual property at the end of the day; and who owns this “know-how”. As we share years of accumulated wisdom with China, India and Brazil – in return for short-term gains (i.e. income from overseas students within the HE sector for instance, or “outsourcing” in telecommunications, software and finance in order to boost profits), we will increasingly move down the food chain. The problem with a knowledge-based economy is that you only have a “first-mover” advantage, and others soon catch up – especially, when you show them how!

Our wage packets have been frozen – in real terms – for many years now; hence mainstream’s enthusiasm for credit. I sometimes feel that we’re already living in a third world country. But maybe the third world is in fact the “real world”, and just something we increasingly need to get used to.