Robert Harris: How Supercomputers are Taking Over World Stock Markets.

The fear haunting Europe is the specter of capitalism. A vast and highly unstable mixture of debt, trillions of dollars of sovereign, corporate and private borrowing, accumulated over decades, is strapped to the Western economies like a suicide bomber's gelignite vest. The task facing our politicians is somehow to defuse the bomb, without inadvertently triggering the sequence of defaults and bankruptcies that would set it off. No wonder they walk around the problem scratching their heads, prodding it gingerly here and there. The horrible truth is dawning that the problem may not be technically solvable. For the first time in my life, I get the sense of what it must have been like to have lived in my grandparent's or great-grandparents' generation: In 1913, say, or 1937. One feels a great smash coming ever closer, almost in slow-motion, and yet there seems to be nothing that can be done to avoid it. How have we gotten ourselves into this mess? After all, we ae supposed to be living in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity. Communism had collapsed, and the threat of nuclear annihilation had receded. Immense advances in computer technology were creating a whole new economies. Vast markets were opening up in the developing world. Above all, we were supposed to have learned enough about economics to have created the necessary institutions - the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the G20, the OECD, to ensure we never repeated the mistakes of the Thirties. Where did it all go wrong? A good place to start looking is a hole in the ground near the small town of Waxahachie, Texas, or, to be more precise, 17 holes in the ground, each of them an air shaft leading down to 14 miles of abandoned tunnel dug into the hard Texan rock, which are all that remains of a grandiose scientific project called the Desertron.