But Janette and Vincent just had a baby, their second. And Helena is going to deliver next month, doubling the happiness and duties of fatherhood for Jake, a decent, industrious young man whom I admire and respect. Nor are these families unique. There are hundreds of millions of lives at stake -- in North America, Europe, Russia, China, Indonesia, Japan -- and it's a cinch that their economic security and safety are less than 12 months away from a catastrophic financial trainwreck.

I'm sure, by now, you've seen the headlines. One third of the global economy is in "recession" -- i.e., negative growth, people earning less money than they did last year. World output as a whole is being affected, and we haven't seen the worst of it. Factory closures in Britain and the U.S. will accelerate as global prices continue to plunge downward, flooding the market with cheap imports. The U.S. Federal Reserve organized an emergency bail-out of a secret "hedge fund" that had leveraged $4 billion of borrowed capital into a $100 billion loss. Top executives at UBS, the largest and strongest bank in Europe, and 1200 traders at ING Barings lost their jobs because they loaned billions to this bankrupt "hedge" outfit, without understanding what the risks were. Clinton and Blair have announced emergency meetings of the IMF, World Bank, G-7 and G-22 finance ministers, to discuss the problem. On the other side of the Pacific, Japan's banking system is dead in the water, holding $1 trillion of bad debts, with corporate bankruptcies rising and widening more or less by the hour. Brazil is about to default (again, for the second time in less than 10 years) on its domestic and foreign debt. Mexico is $35 billion in the hole (again). Russia is economically dead and buried, without enough food for the winter. Mass starvation in Indonesia and Africa is imminent.

What Clinton and Blair propose to do about this breaks down as follows:

1. Bail out the banks, send humanitarian aid to the hungry.
2. Regulate international finance and expand IMF operations.
3. Cut interest rates to stimulate consumer spending.

See anything wrong with this picture? Correct -- it's the same set of "Bretton Woods" policies that have been consistently and repeatedly applied by Western governments during the past 50 years and finally resulted in global meltdown. This time, it won't work. The problem is too big to fix with a few billion here, a few billion there, accompanied by an IMF lecture about bad behavior. The global wreckage (so far) is $2 trillion. They don't have a hope in hell of rescuing Russia or Japan. Foreign aid to feed the hungry might work in the short term, but that's treating symptoms instead of curing the structural problem. Investors don't profit by throwing capital down the drain and being bailed out by the IMF. They don't succeed by lending money to governments (T-bills are a break-even hedge against inflation, nothing more.) The one and only way for savers to increase their wealth is to invest in profitable business opportunities -- and we're in deep shit at the moment, because there ain't none -- no matter how many new paper banknotes that Greenspan or the G-7 or God Almighty decides to print on our behalf.

And print they will. "Debt exit must become a real option," argues Pierre Schori, Swedish minister of development cooperation, echoing the demands of Oxfam and other famine-relief organizations. "Sixteen years into the debt crisis, many of the poorest countries still struggle with unsustainable debt. Despite sustained reform, debt remains a major factor behind weak economic growth and depressed investment."

True enough -- but the biggest debtor of all is the United States. Shall we absolve the U.S. Treasury from paying the $5 trillion it owes ($2 trillion domestically, $3 trillion to foreign lenders)? Go ahead. See what happens if you even hint at the possibility of "rescheduling" some T-bills.

There is not the slightest margin of doubt that our Bretton Woods policy framework has come to grief. We live in a global economic straightjacket that tightens every time a government borrows or prints more money. Private saving and investment are not the problem. Nor can private saving and investment save us. The problem is consumption -- not "overinvestment" or "underinvestment" -- but lavish public spending. For this reason, I have long held that it is necessary to let the economy crash, so something new can arise to replace the Ponzi racket of government borrowing against future tax revenue and massive government spending, which are the sole cause of this economic crisis. Smoke and mirror "loan packages" and "transparency" won't make a damn bit of difference to the bottom line. World governments have bled us dry, mortgaging every penny of our collective future. The socialist game is over, comrades.

But then ... there's Vincent and Janette, Helena and Jake and their innocent babies to consider. I know it's wrong to do this -- a kind of treason I swore I'd never commit -- but I don't think I can bear to watch children suffer. I have no real courage. So, here's how you fix the world economy:

1. Eliminate all discretionary spending, switch to fixed-rate mortgage, cut expenses.
2. Sell your paper assets (stocks, banknotes) and buy real, durable assets (home, tools, truck).
3. Nominate and elect Rep. Lee Hamilton to be U.S. president after the Crash of 1999.