Step back from the abyss

Alternatively, the "working congress" could be similar to the Expert Group appointed by the United Nations to report on "National and International Measures for Full Employment" in 1950.

Its specific purpose would be to give our political leaders and general public a focus on our problems. It would be mandated to define the nature of the global crisis and formulate recommendations for governments to debate and, we might hope, eventually adopt.

Apart from anything else, public understanding has remained so confused since the advent of the GFC in 2008 that some clarification is essential to effective democratic debate.

What we must not do is to continue to rely for our future policies on our present political leaders and such bodies as the Groups of Seven or Twenty. These arrangements have failed us so miserably in the past that we would be foolish to waste the period of a moratorium by relying on them again.

Who will be members on the Expert Group – the "working congress"?

We must select those in whom we have sufficient confidence, not hastily, but as quickly as we can and set them to work in weeks rather than months.

The present economic and financial crisis is the most complex we have experienced since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; but we can resolve it. With correct policies emphasising real fixed-capital investment, productivity and production of real goods and services, we can emerge from the reform process stronger than ever as a global community.

That global community could well have aspirations far beyond economic and financial stability and welfare. It could well reinvigorate the mandate of the United Nations to promote peaceful change and help to create a global community that is fair to all its members, without discrimination. That would be a far more "equal" globalisation than that which has in part been responsible for the GFC and, probably, the political and social unrest in many parts of the world. Conduct governed by greed and remorseless self-interest has helped to impoverish and corrupt human communities around the world in recent decades.

This conduct may well have played a significant role in the unrest, revolts and revolutions which have marked 2011 and which continue as I write.

There has been a tyranny of the rich which is unacceptable and prejudicial to our longer-term welfare. We want the rich to thrive – why wouldn't we if we aim to be rich ourselves? However, we must be fair and treat every individual and group as equally as we can contrive – the rich along with the middle, working and every other legitimate class in the community.

To summarise, we need to do two things at what is this critical moment in human history. We need to win time to find rational solutions to our financial problems by devising a practical and effective moratorium on debts; and we need to use the time won to formulate and agree real growth policies which will return us to global stability and prosperity as quickly and securely as we can.