Larry Summers has committed financial heresy, telling the IMF the whole system may be trapped in long-term, low economic growth, with bubbles the sole, temporary, remedy for unemployment. And President Obama has made inequality a major theme in his latest state of the union address.

The European utopia is turning into a system for delivering punishment. As Europe’s regime gets tougher, there is a growing sense that interchangeable elites are taking advantage of each crisis to tighten their austerity policies and impose their federal fantasy . This twin objective has the support of boardrooms and newsrooms. But even if you boost their ranks with German rentiers, a few Luxembourgers specialising in tax evasion and most of France’s Socialist leaders, popular backing for the (...)