months seem like a mild economic flurry. Even after the subprime mortgage fiasco, there could still be hundreds of billions dollars worth of mispriced credit derivatives on the books of the world's financial institutions.

Much was made of Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary and president of Harvard, stepping off the fence on Monday and conceding in the Financial Times that the US now risked years of economic adversity as a result of the credit crunch. But Jim Sinclair and his tribe have been beating this drum for several years.

Reacting to the European Central Bank injecting yet more cash into the financial system this week, Sinclair wrote with typical pungency: "The size of the global credit meltdown will determine the size of the liquidity injected by all central banks. Since the problem is huge and growing, the Weimar Republic is, without any doubt, the case study of how this will all roll out. You need only substitute the words, 'over the counter credit and default derivatives' for 'war reparations' to see the distinct comparison."