In high school I was invited to join the Union of Communist Youth (actually they were Maoists); those of the PSUC (in fact they were already members); to the Young Guard Always on Guard (they still don’t know what they were)… But what was prevailing in Catalonia, Spain and the world was globalization, free markets and democracy. And half humanity came out of misery.

My parents had enjoyed the developmentalist sixties and I was born to suffer the Age of Containment in the seventies: the first oil crisis just when my father bought the 1500 and the inflation shot right when he asked for his first mortgage at 14% .

But in the nineties of my first car the Soviet wall fell; the story ended suddenly and the world became flat: China was converted, it seemed, to capitalism by force of everything at 100; ex-communist eastern Europe began to manufacture Volkswagen and Russia even seemed to hold elections.

The world was getting bigger without borders and at the same time smaller thanks to low cost flights… And the anxieties of climate change were growing. Until the 2008 recession and we rescued the banks, the poor, and they closed hospitals and when we recovered we were surprised by the pandemic, the war, the polycrises. Democracy grew the Trumpist international willing to take Brasilia and retake the Capitol. China will have to be accepted as it is or risk World War III.

The masters of the universe in Davos, having distressed us by prophesying several recessions, herald another era of growth; especially for them. And they debate how to name her. It is the return of the all-powerful State reinforced in the pandemic and spender of other people’s money in the hands of politicians always on the campaign trail. They distribute showers of billions with happiness inversely proportional to that of the wage earner who pays them and, alas, will pay. Well, they will have to be returned after suffering them as inflation and cuts while Keynes repeats from the grave that it was not that. It has not yet been well explained to us where the Next Generation are – some executive directors of the Ibex do know this – and we are already in the Age of Two Securities: death and taxes.