can it be pulled off for a time? Yes, it has been. The rally in stocks has been and still is against all fundamentals. People who look at the fundamentals were convinced this was a sucker rally and thought it wouldn't last. It has and we were wrong. Others went with it and have made money. So bear this in mind when listening to anything I say.

I never thought governments would saddle their people with such debts. They apparently think the massive debts are either going to be paid off relatively quickly or they have decided public impoverishment is a 'price worth paying' in order to 'save' not banking but specifically the banks and bakers we have.

But your question is can it be sustained? This is THE question. The reason it has to be fast growth is because now we have all the uncanceled debts in the financial system (the cause of the crisis) and the longer they are around the more they cost. We also now have payments on the new sovereign debts we have taken on. And we will have even more costs to bail out more debts that are coming. All of this is much more than can be paid for by selling a few cars and planes.

Only financial and especially housing re-inflation can help us now. That is because bubbles can inflate as fast as you can fan the flames of avarice. AND as prices go back up then the negative equity itself disappears and many securities and other 'assets' will start to be 'worth' what the banks claim they are worth.

The question is will they appreciate and over what time scale? So far all the stimulus trillions has NOT inflated house prices. All it has done is inflate a stock rebound of modest proportions and various commodity speculations. If that's what a couple of Trillion buys then there just isn't enough money to do they job they need doing.

One way of looking at the effect of all this stimulus is to consider it as cash going to off-set the paper losses on debt backed assets. Seen this way Trillions printing and borrowing globally have failed to offset the deflationary effect of debt-backed asset destruction. Deflation is still outstripping even the insane inflationary tactics we are throwing at it.

My feeling is, we can and will continue to throw future tax income on hide and pretend efforts. But the cost of using public money to replace the cash flow which is NOT coming from assets – because despite their mark-to-model valuations, they are not bringing in any cash – is growing and will grow to the point where someone is not getting paid.

Unless those people can be persuaded for the greater banking good to accept the loss, then they will insist on payment, a margin call will not happen and BOOM. This plus the growing likelihood of some sovereign default perhaps caused by some restive population who just won't knuckle under, make me think that this will not last.

If they can re-inflate then we will go through another even bigger bubble. Sovereign debt might be considered such a bubble. AND then the debt will explode.

If no such bubble can be blown then the end is much sooner.

I have a question. You say toward the end of your post that Brown "absolutely has to have massive growth and fast, and only another and larger financial bubble can hope to do this."

I agree with this observation. my question is about boom and bust. Its about the long term picture. We are in the recession phase now but it would seem there is some belief (not least as you point out from those that need it most, politicians, governments and businesses) that rather than crash the whole global monetary system by re-inflating a bubble we will be lifted out of the current situation for a time, or at least till the bubble busts again.

Can this be pulled off for a period of time. I mean can there honestly be such a recovery and if there were is there some sort of timescale to how long it could last. 5years, 10 years, more?

Or is it more likely every goes bottom up – the collapse of the economic system – during this bust we are in right now?

Am i being too sensationalist in this last scenario?