Ten years ago the big worry was that rogue technology would wipe out half the world economy. Today, with businesses and workers struggling to the end of the decade, the groundless fears over the millennium bug seem almost quaint by comparison with what actually happened. It turned out to be bankers rather than computer glitches that wreaked havoc. And the economic dislocation caused by the biggest financial crisis since the 1930s will not dissipate as quickly as the fears over Y2K.

Every decade is, in some way, defined and shaped by the one that precedes it. The nineties had been the era of the second golden age of globalisation, somewhat akin to the 1880s. New technology in the form of the internet, and the welcoming of dozens of communist countries into the capitalist fold, had led markets round the world to dissolve into one.

Having weathered shocks such as the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, confidence was high. The world economy had entered a period known as the Great Moderation. As George Magnus, senior economic adviser to UBS, puts it: “The volatility of almost any economic variable you can think of had collapsed.” It felt, he says, as if the rich economies could have gone on growing at a nominal rate of 5 per cent for ever. Mr Magnus says that, as the decade began, “policymakers generally thought: onwards and upwards, and on we go with globalisation”.