“The US has run out of bullets,” said Nouriel Roubini, professor at New York University, and one of a caste of luminaries with grim forecasts at the annual Ambrosetti conference on Lake Como.

“More quantitative easing (bond purchases) by the Federal Reserve is not going to make any difference. Treasury yields are already down to 2.5pc yet credit spreads are widening again. Monetary policy can boost liquidity but it can’t deal with solvency problems,” he told Europe’s policy elite.

The reason I’ve been a double dipper for the past 18 months is I think this recession is a systemic failure rather than a dip. It has never been solvable by short term policy.

That recession is also about the way we ceded manufacturing capacity to China and elsewhere and how we failed to nurture a balanced wealth creation system – look for errors under finance, the migration from regional and industrial policy to next to no policy, the belief that enterprises could function more efficiently with fewer and fewer people (who have had to work harder and harder and who now resent work), the willingness to grow an expensive, dependent underclass, and the encouragement of a mind set fixated on the upper end of the Maslow pyramid of needs and wants.

I think such a narrow focus on the top of this pyramid is also called hubris and was evinced by the triumphalism of one viewpoint on how democratic capitalism should function.

The solution lies in diversifying our approach – or even just acknowledging that capitalist democracy functions best when a diversity of approaches is supported by policy (diversity is our richest value), promoting a positive view of labour as a wealth creation input rather than being deluded about the mythical and elusive “talent”, teaching ourselves to have needs, and recognising that we have no option but to be inclusive – you cannot run an economy with generations of people who have not worked.

Getting all that right is a ten to twenty year project.

Footnore 1: Roubini:

Dr Roubini said average public debt in the rich countries would rise to 120pc of GDP by 2015 in the rich countries, leaving no scope for a further fiscal stimulus. If they push their luck, they too risk the sort of bond crises seen in Southern Europe this year

Footnore 2. Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson:

“The fiscal crisis seems to be out of control. The ‘big crossover’ is approaching when the US spends more on debt service costs than on security, and historically that is the tipping point for any global power,” he said.

Mr Ferguson said the “Chimerica” marriage of recent years is on the rocks. China is no longer willing to fund the US Treasury bond market, cutting its share of holdings from 13pc to 10pc of the total debt stock.

It seems to me a sensible and responsible issue to be doing scenario analysis around. This what Der Spiegel says:

The issue is so politically explosive that it’s remarkable when an institution like the Bundeswehr, the German military, uses the term “peak oil” at all. But a military study currently circulating on the German blogosphere goes even further.

The study is a product of the Future Analysis department of the Bundeswehr Transformation Center, a think tank tasked with fixing a direction for the German military. The team of authors, led by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Will, uses sometimes-dramatic language to depict the consequences of an irreversible depletion of raw materials. It warns of shifts in the global balance of power, of the formation of new relationships based on interdependency, of a decline in importance of the western industrial nations, of the “total collapse of the markets” and of serious political and economic crises.

To which the only sensible answer is: of course. Of course it is politically sensitive and of course it is a major game changer and of course we would prefer to be in denial.

The father of Peak Oil Colin Campbell point out that it doesn’t mean oil is running out fast, just that the economics of oil production, marketing and use changes because there are so few new barrels to discover. One implication is constantly rising prices, a phenomenon we are already witnessing which in turn brings marginal deposits into the market, so in a sense rising prices extend the life of oil as a resource.

We should expect oil at $200 a barrel and over. Not that Der Spiegel says that. Their take is on the political implications for Europe of oil dependence on Russia.

My view is those countries that think adopting electric vehicles at the rate of 10% by 2030 don’t have a solid enough grasp of our innovation needs. We need to be off oil as a major power source for transportation within fifty years. That’s part of the excitement right?

The FT explained that part of the rationale was, with a banking license Siemens could deposit some of its $9 billion cash pile at the German central bank, instead of with a commercial bank. But it also wants to do more with that money.

Like many of my peers I have a tendency to look for the new in the Web. Clearly Siemens’ action is not a web play and nor is it anything to do with the web. Peer-to-peer banking online is on the increase but total lending through P2P sites over the past three years doesn’t add up to 10% what Siemens has in its cash pile. So change is elsewhere.

In fact it seems to reside in leasing where many vendors (IBM, Microsoft, Sun, and of course Siemens) are ramping up their vendor finance programs. That means they are less and less dependent on banks agreeing leasing deals with large companies.

Here is the curiosity – they are also ramping up their cloud computing offers. The connection might be that banks will be hard pushed to throw a lease agreement over a cloud computing deal but then banks are not minded to lend anyway. IT companies, however, are dependent on a regular corporate equipment refresh. There is some needs and some musts here.

So in short machinations in IT are closely linked to cloud computing and computing finance. Here we witness, I believe, a bigger change in finance than we are seeing on the High St or Main St. In my view no sensible CFO will go forward without diversifying their funding sources for IT so lease will maintain a role but cloud is a financial portfolio necessity.

I picked this up today from Cnet in an article called “Drawing the battle lines”.

“Google has been known to tweak its search algorithm hundreds of times per year, or that the Facebook home page goes through major facelifts on a regular basis.”

The idea is that these two are multiple innovators going head to head in a struggle for dominance of the social web – in reality they both need to do more in mobile but I think Facebook has that won on the social networking side.

Why I was attracted to the article is because it provoked the contrarian in me. I don’t believe Google tweaks its search algorithms that much. Its index is quite poor and increasingly irritating because it is forever tweaking its ad sense algorithms, in effect neglecting its search platform.

Anyone wanting to do serious business research will be suffering credibility if they rely solely on Google for online data. The search for diversification has distracted them, the plaudits of the Google way have done something weird to their business acumen (call it vanity), and I think they’d be better getting back to being pretty good with search.

Smartphones may soon displace some of the estimated 1 billion credit and debit cards in American wallets. AT&T (T), Verizon Wireless, and T-Mobile are planning a venture to develop a mobile payment system that works with smartphones, posing a new threat to Visa (V) and MasterCard (MA), three people with direct knowledge of the plan say.

I had a demo from Visa about a year back of their smart card payments systems (as there are more than one!). Of course Visa and Matercard customers are incentivised as well as punished for their use and overuse of their cards. Verizon and T-Mobile have to work out their customer relations strategies and all the pull and push that goes with it – and with the vast partner networks, and debt collection, that support M and V’s activities. I won’t be saying goodbye to my credit card just yet – not until someone works out a better way of the non-card activity.

In contrast to American optimism, analysts around Europe – and I guess elsewhere – are gearing up for an anxious week. On Friday the European Union publishes results of the bank stress testing procedures. What is a stress test? The test seems to be a systemic one – what happens if bank (a) goes under? How will the system cope? Which banks might go under? We’re unlikely to hear an answer to the latter.

But but….. still, you might argue the big test should be what happens if a sovereign state defaults on its debts.

A legitimate answer to this is when Greece looked likely to default the European Central Bank stepped in. The question now though is whether there is any juice left in the tank if Spain or even the UK default. The UK Office for National Statistics last week announced that UK public debt is five times its published level at 5, not 1, trillion GBP. Spanish debt levels far exceed those of Greece.

So the answer to the question, are we out of recession probably comes down to – have we yet found out how deeply troubled the system really is?

The headline debt figures are a cause of unease. But there is an even bigger issue, the big idea if you like, which is what would life have been like these past twenty years if we had not been running a massive fiscal stimulus without telling anyone?

We need to imagine what we might have been prepared or forced not to do, what new structures would not have emerged, and what would have been a more natural trajectory for society during this period to give ourselves some sense of what a legitimate reordering might look like.

It seems certain that only a fraction of those Europeans who now have second homes in sun spots, would have taken that risk. Spain’s property debt is an indication of how that dream should have remained fantasy. I wonder also in the UK would people have paid over the odds for housing near to good schools and if not would these schools have been able to cement their reputations?

Britain’s spatial history changed over the past twenty years as parents paid not so much for the school but for the property near the school. Would this desperation over a child’s future have been more constructively channeled (and more cheaply channeled) into participation in the education or political system to ensure better schools all round, rather than parents specialising in urban geography? Where did the tipping point come, the one where parents decided that individual action should take precedence over participation.

And would the disaffection with taxation have become so well consolidated that in the USA they are now churning up roads rather than maintain them at taxpayer expense? Somewhere in the past twenty years we have redefined common good. Will stress test Friday change that?

We now face a short term future that is orienting us towards resolving systemic problems at the institutional level. Getting banks in order, reducing quangos, reducing debt, when in fact the future needs addressing at an individual and moral level. Individual in the sense that we are less likely to be participants than we were; moral in the sense that Governments need to address how individuals behaved and what decisions they made, partly to relieve their debt burden and partly to ask big questions again of them NOT about whether or not we can and should reduce the role of Government but instead about how we can improve the decisions of people.

A quintet of professors – Wilhelm Hankel, Wilhelm Nölling, Joachim Starbatty, Karl Albrecht Schachtschneider, and Dieter Spethmann (ex Thyssen CEO) – have just broadened their complaint over the Greek part of the bank rescue to include the new €440bn Stability Facility, which breaks EU law at every turn.

My US friends have been talking confidently about an economic upturn for about a year now, though I see plenty of wise folks also reminding the blogosphere that the recovery is largely jobless – and where there are jobs they are low paid. We have all, except Germany, created economies with little employment multiplier built in (manufacturing jobs used to support 3 jobs in the wider economy whereas a retail job won’t support 1 additional job).

So it is with new respect that American commentators are looking at how Germany has maintained a stable and prosperous economy. A very large clue lies in the actions of the good professors.

In their latest broadside the professors said the rescue fund “self evidently” violates the no-bailout clause of the Lisbon Treaty.

They have seized on comments by France’s Europe minister Pierre Lelouche, who admitted after the summit deal on May 7 that EU leaders had carried out a constitutional coup. “It is expressly forbidden in the treaties by the famous no-bailout clause. De facto, we have changed the treaty,” he said.

Transferring bank debt to sovereign debt and then adding sovereign debt to bank debt, in order that it too can become even more sovereign debt…. that is the circle we are chasing in right now.

And as everyone who has not been rushed into this knows, it really isn’t right.  I’m not qualified to say whether a few big bank failures would be better. The problem in Germany is the small savings banks seem to be most exposed, or too exposed anyway. One way or another the German citizenry is in for a savings hit.

Who, I wonder, believes we are on the road to recovery with these problems still in the system (Spain’s sovereign and property debt apparently equals Euro 2 trilllion!). Yesterday the IMF called on the European Central bank to lend more money. The IMF is normally, and famously, the cutter in chief. Who, I wonder, feels like we are re-running the worst of the 1970s and early 1980s?

This is from Gerd Leonhard. Not an area I get involved in so much – selling. But I recently signed off as a consultant to Symbian and keep mobile front of mind, having just got to an important landmark on my mobile ecosystem analysis. Part of that of course is how the ecosystem evangelizes for a core set of products, relationships and reputations.

Two initiatives that will make meaning more interesting to track and assess came my way this week.

The first is Nokia’s protoype instant community which I picked up on via my Facebook feeds. I guess this is going to make it more difficult to track and interpret behavior.

Nokia Instant Community is a research concept developed by NRC Helsinki in collaboration with Tampere University of Technology. Its a new, instant way for communities to socially interact when in close proximity, without the need for WLAN infrastructure or cellular or Bluetooth connections.

The second is Giovanni Rodriguez’s latest project. I’m always excited by stuff Giovanni does and I am sure this is going to give us a great focal point for business discussions. This might make meaning easier to come by. Take a look at the Clearvale blog.