On Monday, a six-year-old article about a bankruptcy filing by United Airlines reappeared by accident on Wall Street traders' screens as if it were fresh news, prompting a sell-off that wiped $1 billion off the company's market value in a matter of minutes.

Not a single thing about the company had changed over the weekend, but reading an old story on the web, without knowing it was old or bothering to check, was enough to persuade market traders to sell, sell, sell. Confidence in the company had been eroded, and without public confidence, a company's shares are not worth very much, as we have seen elsewhere this week.

I mention this because it explains a lot about what has been going on in the past few days. Several people have teleferned to ask whether the world was coming to an end, and what it might mean for Bermuda and for them individually. It is a big subject, and it will take weeks to explain it all, but I will try, coming at it from different angles. I am going to keep it light, which might seem insensitive with so much gloom swirling around, but if ever a little humour was needed, it is now.

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First: no, the world is not coming to an end. What we are seeing is a normal reaction to years of good times, which are always followed by some bad times on the great financial carousel we call capitalism. The bad times are being experienced differently this time, but their arrival is different every time. The degree of shock and sense of panic is always about the same, however. It has been like this for hundreds of years. This is how life works. Ugly, ain't it?

Second: Bermuda need not suffer unduly from this week's news, if calm heads prevail. In fact, the collapse of American International Group (AIG) offers other re/insurance companies opportunities for growth, which would be good for Bermuda. The Island has other pressures of far greater importance, internal and external, which I won't address here.

Third: What is going on now is not as bad as what happened in 1987 or 1929, and we are better equipped to deal with it now.

Fourth: Normal service will be resumed in due course - although it will be a different kind of normal, as it always is - and we will look back on this as just one of those chapters in the ups and downs of life.

I say all this as a man whose shares have plummeted in value in the past few weeks, and who expects them to keep falling before they recover. As a man who bought AIG shares at $47 not too long ago, confidently saying: "How much farther can they fall?", and as a man who is buying more stocks as fast as his broker can identify companies that are currently under-priced (We are talking a few thousand dollars here, rather than millions, sadly).

In other words, I am exactly as deep in the soup as a man can be, and yet I am completely confident that what we are seeing, unpleasant though it is, is business as usual. If you have been following the advice this page delivers week in and week out, you should also be relatively unfazed by it all.

Mind you, I have a job in Bermuda and a home, so I can afford to be optimistic. If you are out of work, homeless and not living in Bermuda, things will not look quite as rosy - but then for that crowd, things did not exactly look too sharp six weeks ago, and frankly, they never will.

But enough about me.

* * *

"All these boring people,/see 'em on TV,/making up all those stories/about how bad things have come to be..." - Randy Newman ("Roll With the Punches").

I must say this. Please, please, please ignore the "instant analysis" on TV by so-called 'axperts'. The only news channel I watch is the BBC, and they could not have employed more half-witted business correspondents if they had dredged up boulders from the bottom of the Thames and put suits on them. These folk know absolutely nuffin' about nuffin', but it doesn't stop them pretending to present a balanced "analysis" of what is going on.

Ignore them all, for your own sanity. The BBC thrives on bad news from the States and its presenters are grossly under-paid, know-nothing kindergarten dropouts. I have worked for the BBC, and I know.

But enough about me.

* * *

I found it very amusing this week to watch Alan Greenspan talking about this being the worst financial situation in the past 50 years, if not 100. I say "amusing" in a sardonic way, because Mr. Greenspan must shoulder a big part of the blame. His utterly mad, bad and dangerous policy of holding interest rates near zero for some years merely served to defer the unavoidable.

It allowed matters to become so much worse that when things blew up, they did so in a manner of epic proportions.

For some years, in this newspaper and elsewhere, I have been pointing out that Mr. Greenspan's counsel would prove deadly. I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so.

For this villain to now show up on TV, declaiming the irresponsible behaviour of others, made hollow laughter the only appropriate response.

If you think it is big-headed of me, a scruffy journalist, to think I could be smarter than the chairman of the Fed, you are surprisingly wrong.

The basic principles that have lasted for thousands of years should never be abandoned.

The arrogance, in thinking that he could reinvent how economics works, was all Mr. Greenspan's.

Had interest rates been held at a reasonable level, savers and the retired would not have been cheated and forced to finance the greed of Wall Street bankers and the impossible ambitions of those who could not afford to buy homes. A sensible interest rate would have kept the sub-prime crowd from buying what they could not afford.

We would have had a recession earlier than we will now, but it would have been shallower and much more survivable. It might even have been over by now.

Economic systems rise and fall. Mr. Greenspan stuck by his pals in the banking sector and failed those with savings.

Now, after the inevitable fall of those without the desire or ability to save, whom Mr. Greenspan was so keen to see involved in the markets, comes the fall of the irresponsible bankers.

Bear Sterns and AIG have been bailed out; Lehman Brothers has failed; and Merrill Lynch and HBOS have been bought.

That may be the most extraordinary sentence I will ever write.

The only way for century-old banks and brokerage houses to go broke is a combination of incompetence and hubris. Abetted, in this case, by incompetence and hubris on the part of the authorities.

I would imagine that Mr. Greenspan now fears for his place in history. He need not worry. He will go down as the biggest fool of the lot. A pox on his house, in good measure because, thanks to him, there is a pox on everyone else's house.

* * *

The basic message, then is: do not panic, just as the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy tells us.

In the weeks ahead, if I have not been sent on a rendition flight to Zurich and dropped in Lake Geneva with cement boots on, I will explain a little about how speculators have been catalysts in what we have seen; how the private sector has mounted repeated raids on weak governments for underserved and unjustifiable bail-outs (although the AIG deal was the right one to make and may in the end show the US Government a profit, especially since it is charging 11 percent interest on the loan); how the morally bankrupt Eliot Spitzer is a co-baddie in all this, with Mr. Greenspan, Bill Clinton, George Soros and Google; and Lord Knows what else, all peppered, of course, with relentless boring details about myself.

Bet you can hardly wait.