In future you will be able to find all of my writing here.

Trichet and his fellow ECB board member Jurgen Starck are currently holding a hard line against EU politicians who want to begin the process of letting Greece default on its debts; meanwhile back in the IMF, a process that makes the Pope's election look transparent has begun to "select" a new leader.

Is there a pattern emerging here?

If there is it concerns the relationship between elected politicians, sovereign governments and the plutocrats they select to run organisations that are supposed to enforce transnational agreements.

Traditionally the IMF was run by a bureaucrat - not exactly faceless but somebody with an impeccable record inside, say the French civil service. In the ECB there is no such thing as "traditionally" because it's only been going since 1998; its leadership was carved up between France and Germany: Wim Duisenberg, its first boss, gave way to Mr Trichet (once Trichet had been cleared of fraud charges) in 2003.

Last week it was carved up again when most EU states agreed Mario Draghi should be the next boss.

What's changing is the overt politicisation of the roles. Clearly, just doing some amateur sociology, you would have to conclude the gene pool from which such posts are recruited is not large. You have to be an older man with a long history of backroom dealings with politicians.

While technically I have as much chance as Gordon Brown as becoming the next leader of the IMF, in practice, almost nobody in the world has a fair chance of competing for these vital jobs.

They are carved up from within the elite circle of people who go to Davos, Bilderberg, the Group of Thirty and all the other places where rugged men with earpieces and bulging jackets separate the elite from the demos.

But since these transnational institutions were invented something has changed: the world is no longer dominated by the United States economically; Europe is no longer the fiefdom of Germany, and no longer confident of the basis on which the single currency was founded.

Both the IMF and ECB need people in charge who can square vested interests; do deals; wield the machinery of public and private power. Having chosen a forthright and idiosyncratic social democrat as the first overtly political head of the IMF, the two front runners now seem to be forthright and idiosyncratic politicians again: Christine Lagarde and Gordon Brown.

The IMF and ECB are, right now, locked together around a single, pivotal problem: Greece.

Greece was given a bailout that demanded austerity; it enacted austerity and plunged into recession; there is protest - and more importantly civil disobedience. The markets believe Greece will be forced to restructure its debts - ie not pay them all back.

This could amount to 50% of what they owe. EU politicians are divided over what to do: Mme Lagarde wants to allow Greece to do a "soft restructure" - ie delay payback - in return for a massive round of privatisation; Germany wants to delay the crunch until 2013 and then impose losses on the banks that lent Greece the money.

But the ECB is having none of it. After Trichet's walk-out from his meeting with Herr Juncker, the head of the Eurogroup of political leaders, ECB negotiators have adopted "Non, nein, ochi" approach to Greek requests for restructuring. They have good reason to do this because the constitution they are guardians of forbids it. But the constitution is, in reality in tatters.

On the other side of the table sits the IMF. Under DSK it accumulated more than enough money to deal with the Eurozone crisis; it has already saved Eastern Europe by imposing flexible terms for bailouts; until DSK's involuntary trip to a Harlem police station he had been engaged in trying to soften the EU's stance, in order to avoid a fracturing of the Eurozone and of social order in Greece.

The tricky problem for democracy here is: none of these men is actually elected - they are selected by those nations who wield real power in the world. However those nations do have leaders who are elected, and they are elected in order to promote the interests of the country they come from - not somebody else's.

So while figures such as DSK or Trichet may look like distant mandarins, otherworldly and at the same time possessing knowledge of where every economic skeleton in the world is buried - actually they are the best means we have of allowing nations to mediate between their interests. They are both wielders of, and the products of, hard power.

Oxfam and other NGOs are already calling for the IMF process to be an election by open voting (albeit within the rigged voting system of the IMF); and for nominations to be open.

However, the problems with these posts go beyond the election process.

Because if you were to make a list of all the potential candidates for the ECB job, and all the potential candidates to replace Strauss-Kahn, it's not just the "old male white guy" problem that is obvious - it's the fact that they were all formed in a previous economic epoch: the dirt that hit the fan in 2008 accumulated "on their watch"; the democratic revolutions that broke out in 2010 were a challenge to their worldview, and they had done little or nothing to promote them.

Meanwhile, the world is moving on: a new generation of businesspeople, thinkers, workers is rising with very different mindsets, priorities: in politics, the extremes are becoming stronger.

The interchangeable centre-left/centre-right technocrats barely interface with such people as Timo Soini or Sarah Palin, and regard them privately with disdain; ditto with the generation of youth that - so far leaderless - has embraced activism, eco-warriordom, democratic revolution in the Middle East etc.

While we all start obsessing about which old geezer will replace DSK, and track the rumours spilling out of the ECB's clash with Ecofin over Greece, it's worth wondering - even if only in the last paragraph of a blog post - whether somebody like Lady Gaga, or Ellen MacArthur, or Egyptian Google icon Wael Ghonim, or Chinese blogging superstar Han Han might do the job just as well.

But this is, of course, unthinkable: could such a job be trusted to such mercurial and untested people? Just think what trouble they might get themselves into!

Ten years ago the Fund stood accused of doing that in a way that - during the 1980s and 90s - actually increased poverty in the developing world, blighting the lives of millions of people; and then in the Asian crisis - imposing solutions that harmed the people there - Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia - but directly benefited the USA.

Then there was a big change in international thinking and the first test of it was the financial crisis of 2008.

During that crisis DS-K did the following:

- he raised so much money there was at one point too much of it

- he brought China, India and Brazil and Russia closer to the decision making centre

- long before it moved to save Greece, Ireland and Portugal the Fund had bailed out Hungary, Ukraine...

- threw the IMF's weight behind multilateral re-regulation of finance; so the IMF was a key voice in all the G20 summits where they co-ordinated bank bailouts and fiscal stimulus...

Through it all, it's fair to say that Strauss-Kahn's IMF demanded less outright structural reform; was less ideological; and with some countries was lenient to the point startling those who knew the Fund of old.

I would also add that, with DS-K's encouragement, the Fund's economists became some of the biggest alarm-ringers about the global slump, and advocates of co-ordinated fiscal stimulus, at a time when domestic politicians were pretty blase about it and some even advocating pro-cyclical "let it rip" approaches that would have plunged us well and truly into a 30s style denoument.

So how will the incapacitation of DSK - tonight denied bail in New York - affect the current round of bailouts? Quite simply it will deprive the pro-leniency faction in Europe of an ally.

The IMF leadership is already hollowed out; the current deputy has announced his departure date this year some of the new MDs are not quite in position.

From Ireland to Greece to Portugal - what you always hear from politicians, on the edge of these fraught negotiations in soul-draining posh hotels is: we'd rather be bailed out by the IMF than by the EU and the IMFcombined. The IMF's economists are basically seen like the classic British Army sergeant: "tough but fair". Not so the EU, whose response has become increasingly politicised.

Right now the country that could bring the bailout plans crashing down is Greece. It wants a second bailout valued at 50bn and many commentators, and almost all investors (but no politicians) believe it will eventually go for a partial default on its debts.

There's a joint EU/IMF fact finding delegation there, and while the EU governments response to that report will now be seen as highly political - they've all got right wing parties on their backs demanding tough conditions - the IMF will be less tough.

Strauss-Kahn's role would have been to moderate that.

I've no doubt that at his meeting with Merkel, postponed indefinitely now, he's likely to have said: look Angela, don't make the Greeks eat more dirt than they have to or you'll cause a revolution.

In this, despite the political rivalries with Sarkozy, his position mirrored that of the French - to insist on toughness but to play realpolitik across the whole continent (Frau Merkel does not currently seem capable of playing it even in Baden Wurttemberg, despite it being a German word).

The danger is, not so much without DS-K but without a firm IMF, north Europe imposes such a high price on southern Europe for the next round of bailouts that the solidarity cracks.

While everyone is obsessing about the "European ownership" issue of the IMF top job (it always goes to a European), I think it's more significant that DS-K was the first active social-democrat politico to run the Fund in modern times: its economics department, its expanded agenda to take in global financial stability and the reshaping of the global balance of power reflected that.

Of course there is a huge dynamic now unfolding in French politics now, as well - and the legal drama is riveting. We'll explore some of that on Newsnight, tonight.

I start with these links because they will instantly become hard to find from the Newsnight main page.

To pick two of my favourite links at random, for nostalgia's sake, go here (on Sven) and here (on 7/7).

The new blog will be on in-house software that I have not yet had the pleasure of using. It will contain my Twitter feed and links to reports I have done on Newsnight. I don't know if I will be able to drop anarchically self-generated graphs and pictures into it yet - I hope so.

It will be surrounded by the page furniture of an ordinary BBC website so I will have fun trying to replicate what an actual blog includes - ie blogroll, external links, quirky animated gifs of whippets and embedded Northern Soul songs from Youtube etc.

The prose will retain its chaotic, first-draft-beta style and I will try to write in paragraphs of more than one sentence. I will continue to tweet deep links to the content. Apparently there is some rebellion going on among commenters about the proposed limitations on comments on other blogs and I leave you to it.

I will continue to cover the usual subjects: quantitative easing, English football, the London stage, the Arab Spring, the global economic crisis, all things geeky and any riot I can get safely close to.

Despite the numerous logistical challenges of the move it will be worth it as the content will now be only a few dozen clicks away from the BBC's main page. I will retain the dry humour, of course.

And I might squeeze one last post onto this platform if, as I expect, the secret bailout of Greece happens sometime Sunday.

The blog technically migrates on Tuesday night, so I will keep you posted on what happens at the Orwell Prize via Twitter (@paulmasonnews) - however, whether I win or not, the tweets may become progressively less coherent on the night, though for different reasons.

Having tried to do several things at once, they may now struggle to achieve just one.

Having drifted into presenting the reforms as a kind of market-led Year Zero (and allowed numerous private sector participants to hail it as such) there may now be just a series of incremental changes. But this creates its own problems.

At the heart of the NHS White Paper (July 2010) were three principles:
1) Money follows the patient, allowing GPs to choose the best care provider, cutting out the last part of the Labour-invented health bureauracy (the PCT/SHAs)
2) A focus on outcomes not inputs: so an eventual move to patient reported outcome measurements (PROMS) rather than targets for numbers of operations done
3) Clinicians rather than politicians or managers in charge of decisions on care; this meant the effective "denationalisation" of the NHS, creating an arms length body nationally and allowing failing hospitals to go bust.

The White Paper was, if nothing else, intellectually coherent. The Conservatives, in opposition, had concluded that the internal market introduced by Labour was functioning badly; failing to boost productivity; failing to bear down on costs; failing to give bang for bucks to the patient or the taxpayer.

Being Conservatives they concluded what was needed was a more perfect, less interrupted or constrained market. So they set about constructing a more pure one.

First there would be a clear "customer": the GPs, who would hold up to £80bn a year spending power on behalf of the patient.

Second there would be a clearer measure of value: PROMS - patient reported outcome measurements would replace input measurements (ie number of operations done, lengths of stay in hospital etc).

Third there would be a completely level playing field between the public and private sectors in terms of provision of the service: a free as opposed to an unfree market.

In addition the move to private and charity-sector provision would "create the largest social enterprise sector in the world" - fulfilling the touchiest, feeliest of the Big Society goals; mutually-owned clinics etc.

It's important to unpack where it's all gone wrong, and how it might be put together again, because the Bill is currently being torn apart by three sets of people: the Libdems, responding to their left-leaning voting base who want no private involvement (none at all, as Simon Hughes said yesterday); the NHS workforce and professions, who all have varying degrees of concern about the workability of the project; and Conservative health policy wonks and civil servants who fear (to their despair) that the whole thing only works if you do it all at the same time.

If you take the "pure" market as designed by Andrew Lansley, with its GP customer, its PROMS measure of value and its newly neutral stance on who can provide services, what was the ideal outcome supposed to be?

Actually it's the one numerous Labour reforms hinted at but never enacted: a publicly financed market in NHS care from which the private sector can at last make serious profits and into which, eventually, middle class customers (aka patients) can add-on services through insurance, co-payment etc.

Early on, Tory ministers and outsourcing company chiefs envisaged a mass of mutually-owned clinics (with protected pay and pension rights for the medics and nurses etc who formed them, but not for the next generation of employees); they envisaged that 30+ NHS trusts would go bust, allowing the private sector to take them over and estabilish a new footprint in the secondary healthcare sector; and that private "commissioning support" companies would swarm into the GP group practices, providing profit-generating services there.

It was supposed to be win-win. The health outcomes would get measurably better; patients would feel they had some modicum of choice; the professions, especially primary carers like GPs and practice nurses, would feel like they had a bigger stake in the NHS; the private and mutual sectors would gain access to business opportunities in the NHS.

There was only one problem. As numerous medics and health experts pointed out, there was no guarantee it would work.

The transition costs alone, in disruption, would be huge. But above that, the reason serial Labour health ministers had constrained the market, adopting state-ist rather than truly market measurements of performance, was: a pure market can go chaotically wrong, or begin to deliver benefits to the wrong participants.

So first, there's been a marked reluctance among health professionals form mutuals. As one leading consultant at a London hospital put it to me: "yes we could take over our clinic and run it ourselves; but it would pit us in competition against our neighbouring hospitals whereas our medical ethos is one of collaboration".

GPs apart, there were very few material inducements for health professionals to take part; meanwhile a few former managers were going around claiming to have enhanced their salaries by moving to the "commissioning support" sector. True or not, this has played very badly with NHS staff.

Second, there is fear among the public that the majority gets a second-class service. One health outsourcing company boss, who'd been influential with Mr Lansley at an early stage, put it to me this way: "even though there's no co-payment, what you could get are GP surgeries totally dedicated to serving professional middle aged men, specialising in prostate screening, cholesterol etc; and then next door maybe there could be a private health company offering the stuff you don't get on the NHS - prompt physio for all those squash injuries; alcohol counselling; a gym etc".

This appealed to me, put that way, as I am a professional middle aged man. But as the thought occurred to non-professional, non-sharp elbowed groups that they would be left dumped in surgeries with no middle class people at all, indeed a surfeit of the neediest and unhealthiest, the term "cherry picking" gained currency. As measures were put in place to reassure people about cherry picking, some of the advantages to the middle class (who governments are perennially worried will "desert the NHS" if they are not molycoddled) seemed to fizzle out.

Third, there is an obviously un-won argument about private provision. One boss of a private treatment centre group complained to me, during the Labour years: "The NHS is a learning organisation; we will start out beating its performance but given time it will copy us and do it cheaper; we don't need a level playing field; we need the playing field tilted in our direction." One measure he requested was to pay, like the NHS, zero VAT.

Though private provision - of core NHS services - is at the heart of the White Paper, large sections of the public remain unconvinced that this will deliver anything more than profits to the private sector at the expense of care.

One reason is that the lessons of Labour's experiment with ISTCs - factory style treatment centres staffed by indefatigable South African and Aussie eye surgeons - was not 100% successful. Outsourcing overnight GP services to private companies has, likewise, not been acclaimed as a major success.

If this argument about private provision had been aired in the general election, the government might have had less trouble winning it now; but it wasn't.

And then there are the minor, cultural niggles which turned out to be major. Many GPs don't want to be businessmen, wielding their part of the £80bn. They don't want to be part of a giant clinic but want to go on being family doctors. It took some time for this feeling to filter through to the GP organisation leaderships, but eventually it did.

Meanwhile, many patients, wondering already whether the amount of time their GP spends staring at a computer screen during consultations, were worried that the new arrangements create a conflict of interest: how does the GP take the best decision for the patient when his/her profits depend on the most efficient use of the money attached to that patient?

So, predictably once people realised what's involved, the reform has stalled. But what, logically, can be saved?

The patient-reported outcome measurement was always something that, given time, might supplant the pure measurement of inputs, if it can be proven technocratically to be better. Given time, in any kind of market - even a constrained one - a better measure of value can deliver better results.

Private involvement: well that is already looking more constrained at the level of care provision; private providers were complaining they did not have the capacity to deliver in the short term much more than 5-10% of care (Labour's ceiling on private provision, once, in the last days of Blairism before Andy Burnham took over, was 15%, if you remember). So what you could do is let the private provision angle - and the mutualism - evolve over time.

What you cannot do is compromise half-and-half on who spends the budget. Either it is the old commissioning system, half dismantled but now having to be reinstated; or a new one based on GPs. To save the latter proposal you would have to address the problem of conflict of interest, cherry picking and place a limit on the amount of a GP's budget that can be spent on "commissioning support".

The problem is, then, none of this becomes a revolution; it becomes a technocratic evolution of the old system by trial and error.

But then what you do not need is the "denationalisation" of the NHS. This has been at the heart of the White Paper, and is what many of the Royal Colleges etc are worried about; creating an arms' length service, where the NHS is not controlled by politicians; where there is no duty of the Secretary of State to provide healthcare as now; and where a hospital can - like a university - go bust, disappear, be privatised etc.

The White Paper's problem lay in trying to do many things at once: solve a productivity problem; a health outcomes problem; to create biggest mutual sector in world; to mend what they said was a malfunctioning half-market system; and to save money - all at the same time. We will never know if the system as designed would have worked, because it is already clear parts of it will not get through.

If you started with just one of the aims outlined above it would choose itself: saving money is a given; and health outcomes are the only measure the public actually cares about.

All the rest could be scrapped, or left to evolutionary non-legislative change if you wanted to. But it would not exactly be a great example in systems design, and you could not present it as Year Zero.

Finally there is a missing player in all this: Labour. Apart from campaigning to "defend frontline services" and stop an "expensive top down reorganisation" there is little sign of a comprehensive policy (it's in review of course). As 2015 gets closer, health professionals are going to want to know how much of what gets through this year Labour would unpick.

There are huge strategic problems facing healthcare in Britian: fiscal austerity, an ageing population, the patchy outcomes of the present system and the growing expectations of patients; de facto rationing; plus the timebomb of an essentially privatised adult social care system.

What they demand is a comprehensive strategy. What's probable now is that we get a less comprehensive one.

Here's my snap judgement: it's those with strong personalities and strong narratives that are navigating the choppy waters best.

Alex Salmond has a strong narrative, not just on nationalism but on a mixture of social, economic and eg health policies. Cameron has a strong (ish) narrative and a growingly distinct international profile (on Libya, and despite that new quiff, OBL); he is convincing the Conservative heartlands of southern England that the cuts agenda is right (for now - the cuts have hardly started; and bear in mind he has done a body swerve on the NHS).

Clegg does not currently have a narrative, and so his personality - which played so well during the general election debates - cannot cut through the "betrayal" story. And he's finding out how well students can transmit electoral hostility now they are effectively 50% of every age cohort.

Ed Miliband? Difficult one this. Labour will be tribally delighted to have stuffed the Libdems in the north of England, ditto Plaid and the independent left in Wales.

But the Scottish defeat poses all kinds of strategic problems for Labour. The big one is obvious: if we now have an independence referendum and Scotland votes yes, that's the end of Labour's traditional arithmetic in Westminster. Even if things don't move that fast, Miliband faces having to take on and shake up the Scottish Labour mafia, which is essentially Brownite and has performed dismally. And then there's England. If the British political situation swings back to the Labour north versus the Tory south, Labour strategists believe the party can never win that game. The decimation of the Libdems merely clears the fog of war for the essential battle to begin, which under any electoral system will always be the Labour fight for the urban south.

Of course, economics plays into this, credibility, specific issues. But if you stand back and squint to see only the main outlines: the strongest and most charismatic party leader in Britain made the biggest gains; the weakest one had a catastrophe.

And despite a positive night at the tactical level in the north, Ed Miliband faces strategic problems that the removal of his adenoids will not make go away.

The newspapers here in Cairo had missed the news, except one which squeezed a brief factual account alongside a picture of Osama. On another one the main picture is of a delegation from Britain's RMT union on Tahrir Square.

In the vox pops the overwhelming response has been: I don't believe he is dead. There are no pictures and they ditched the body. That is what anybody who cared to answer on camera said. and while it is a response stronger among the poor, I have now met several well educated Cairenes who say the same.

Many people believed he was already dead, and there is such distrust of the west, for it's alleged duplicity, that even people who go to the American University of Cairo are often not inclined to believe America.

What will sort this out is pictures and evidence. On Jan 25th, here, many mobs of potentially reactionary people were turned around to the revolution by seeing with their own eyes the truth. Interestingly the government here in Egypt has refused to comment all day on the slaying of OBL. Again, while scripted statements from world leaders are sometimes dismissed as pointless, they soon have meaning when they do not happen.

However, the death of Bin Laden is a significant moment. As Bahey Ael a din Hassai, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Study put it to me just now:

"Bin Laden died last night; but politically he died months ago; with the Arab spring the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria and soon I hope Saudi took a step into politics."

The opportunity and the challenge for political Islam here is huge. The constitutional reform has created an electoral process which massively favours the Muslim Brotherhood; and their popularity in poor areas is a source of depression for the secular youth trying to take radical and liberal politics to the people.

However the Brotherhood has begun to splinter: a section of it's youth wing broke away; some leaders are forming a new party. The fundamental issue is this: it is one thing to wield street power by doling out charity to a population that has been dumped on by a wealthy secular elite. But once you are in politics you have to have a position on stuff like the minimum wage, should doctors go on strike, should there be kissing allowed on TV programmed. That is you have to go beyond charity and into the world of compromise and dialogue, because you cannot buy breakfast for 85 million people.

Bin Laden's death is only a signal moment in this regard. Actually the real challenge of political islam is only just beginning.

In the taxi there was the official trade union conference blaring from the radio, and it sounded like they, too were trying to come up with a tone differentiating their event from it's usual atmosphere - which was as befits a state run union full of factory managers in a dictatorship. Someone even denounced Mubarak.

On the square they've begun to go way beyond this.

From around 1pm there were contingents turning up usually as follows: about 60 people; home made banners congratulating the workers of District X for celebrating 1 May. Usually fronted by broad chested, well turned out - ie skilled and non precarious - middle aged manual workers. Then their sons and a few wives, or occasionally with the white collar workers, women employees. They would chant for a bit then join the throng, about 10,000 strong by the end.

I interviewed numerous people speaking in Arabic - I have still gotta get translations so I summarise: 

Maintenance manager from a small town wandering around with his son dressed in the football colours of Spain: nothing has changed economically but we're happy to be here.

Ticket collector from the subway: dressed in the t-shirt of the new independent union federation, linking arms with his buddies: we want the old bosses to be kicked out of the enterprises; a minimum wage and the reversal of privatisations. Almost word for word a guy - again a middle manager - from the Cairo Gas Co, who adds that the revolution is now "my whole life" as it will determine my children's fate.

There is no singing of the International, and the only people carrying red flags are the newly "out" Communist Party (are they Russians, asks one old geezer, adding: Are you Russian?) - and the newly formed Democratic Labour Party - which is a project involving the far left and the Indy union leaders.

Mostly people carry Egyptian flags: and sing the national anthem. Plus there is a bit of football regalia. A young ultra from Zamalek FC tells me how he came with four thousand football fans on the 28 January, in defiance of people in the club hierarchy who told them the protesters were foreign agents.

"Why don't you ask me about football?" he says, when I begin quizzing him on the social dynamics of urban poverty. OK then, I ask him how Zamalek are doing. "The problem is the fans are spending too much time talking about the revolution and not enough about football".

It's clear that the football ultras, who never got on well with the cops, were one of the conduIts for bringing the urban poor onto the streets.

I ask a couple of older workers what they did on Jan25th: "We came down here with our workmates. Gradually other industries came down here and the strange thing is, though we all work in separate industries, we now know each other's faces."

Despite this, the independent unions are at a very rudimentary stage. Most have this mixture of wage demands, demands against particular corrupt bosses and things they want to happen to the structure of their industry: they are hyper specific. They do not see themselves as opposed to, or separate from the educated professionals who led the revolution.

This latter group is, as I have written before, increasingly perturbed by the strength of the Muslim Brotherhood, it's alleged close relationship with the army, and the benefit both derive from the speed of the elections.

One activist, a female human rights worker and part of the newly formed Social Democratic Party told me of the hurdles you have to jump to get on the ballot paper: register 5,000 members and publish the entire list in two national newspapers. The estimated cost is equivalent to 200,000 GBP.

She was not worried by the proliferation of new parties. Only the election timing, which seems to her designed to deliver a majority for the old elite and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Increasingly liberal intellectuals are beginning to talk about an "Ataturk model" - ie making the army the guarantor of the secular constitution as in Turkey; they look wistfully at Tunisia, whose transition is being more heavily influenced by the international community, NGOs etc. I recommend the novels of Orhan Pamuk to them, on the pros and cons of Turkish military secularism.

As the military police moved people off the central reservation at dusk, it was peaceful and jokey. One veteran traffic cop told us: "it's chaotic now, with all the traffic and the marchers; but we are saying nothing now; later we will impose order". He meant later in the political process, I think.

Few among the protesters and activists doubt an imposition of order is one potential outcome, hence some would rather have it Ataturk style than Ahmadinejad style. 

Among the workers though, the thinking remains for many at the horizon of their own lives and workplace. They are still stunned to be standing there amid communists, social democrats and everything in-between, totally free of their old bosses, who they allege used the state run union to spy on them and dispense corruption.

The doctors' strike has been called for 10 May after a rancourous mass meeting lasting 5 hours in which the Muslim Brotherhood argued against the strike but got overturned, amid acrimony, by the largely young, secular membership (including many female doctors), with a lot of pushing and shoving on the platform.

As far as I can tell that is they only trouble there's been here, though after I left there were reports on Twitter that some people objected to having a music party in the square out of respect for its martyrs. [Update 1900 local: it seems there was some trouble and the police intervened, leading the stage to be dismantled, as the crowd had swelled to around 50,000. Thanks to the non-effectiveness of loperamide against the bug I have caught, I could not stay.]

However up to the time I left the first May Day in Egypt was chilled out and its sheer ordinariness what was extraordinary.

In white letters, across a wall next to Tahrir, is grafitti which says: "Enjoy the Revolution". In English. At midnight local time, on the eve of 1 May, a lot of people are out doing precisely that. The zippy motorbike youths, the youths arm-in-arm on the bridge over the Nile, the families on their plastic chairs taking in the air on the Nile bridges.

Tomorrow (today) will be interesting because it is May Day.

Under Mubarak, the official trade unions (ETUF) would hold a soviet-style celebration, but their ex leader is now under investigation for his alleged role in mobilising the camel attack on 28 January.

Today however something different is expected. Overnight a coalition of labour unions and leftists has formed the Democratic Labour Party; the flaming fist on their logo suggests they will not be applying to become a sister party with Ed Miliband's Labour Party. 

Independent unions will be trying to demonstrate in the square in the afternoon of 1 May - which will be a first for a country that rigorously policed the holiday in previous years.

I've met a group of doctors - the Doctors' Coalition - who are trying to bring the entire country's publicly employed medical profession out on strike in mid-May. The issue: well they have two demands - the sacking of the health minister and the imposition of a maximum wage and a minimum wage in the health service.

Here's why.

Egyptian doctors in the state sector earn the equivalent of £30 a month. 

This is not a misprint or a decimal point misplacement or a fat finger: thirty quid a month. I am talking about "residents" and other junior doctors. Some hospital managers however earn £1,700 to £2,000 a month. This is how one doctor explained it to me:

"The corruption was official. The hospital managers would cut deals with drug suppliers, with other contracts etc and pass what they wished down to the workforce on the basis of favouritism: to this nurse, to that doctor, who would then be required to repress their part of the workforce."

"What we want is for the health budget to rise: it is 3.5% of GDP and it should be 15%. But if we place a maximum salary of 15x the minimum in the health service we can stop the corruption."

One hospital, in Heliopolis, on the outskirts of Cairo, already overthrew its managers and elected new ones; they faxed the name of the newly elected manager to the health ministry and two hours later a fax came back confirming recognition. Others are considering the same thing. 

The doctor I spoke to alleged that the Muslim Brotherhood, which controls the Doctors' Syndicate, would try to stop the strike. I only managed to speak to secularist, progressive doctors - so I can't get the other side of the story from the MB. But the secularists are in a debate about how soon and how long to strike for, and whether to link up with other health professions. They have absolutely no idea whether they can get people to support them.

This organised labour aspect of the Egyptian revolution is in its infancy. I sense an uneasiness about it among the educated youth who sparked the revolution. It is for some simultaneously unglamorous and potentially divisive; it takes the revolution into the realm of pounds and piasters, out of the realms of high ideals. It is certainly not the key dynamic in any sense, yet.

It's been confirmed today that the army is to reopen the Rafa crossing with Gaza next week. There is general mystification about the actions and intentions of the army, even among very savvy youth. They don't get much of a clue about the factional struggle inside the army: in fact I would say the average Chinese intellectual has better information about the intra-factional fighting in the CCP than the average Egyptian Facebook youth has about what's really going on in the army.

Nevertheless, in civil society, parties are forming. And they do represent, respectively, the liberal middle classes, the Muslim Brotherhood and its more critical youth section - which in turn represents a large part of the rural and urban poor and youth; and then various leftist projects, and now the Democratic Labour Party. 

The former regime gets on with its life - those that are not incarcerated - and it is generally expected they will form some kind of jeunesses d'oree kind of party when they are allowed to (many of their offspring are immensely rich).

Around the square now, dominated by the dead hulk of the burned out NDP HQ and the very much living concrete building where Egyptions have to go to get various permits, there are stalls selling revolution paraphernalia: t-shirts extolling 25 Jan, Facebook, "proud to be an Egyptian".

And small posters which are variations on a single theme: the desired execution of Hosni Mubarak. There is Mubarak in Guantanamo jumpsuit; Mubarak and the entire former regime on a mass gallows surrounded by a crowd; Mubarak and the regime photoshopped onto a team photo of a football team, with their wealth in billions displayed where the sponsors name would be on the shirt.

One man tells me: sixty per cent of Egyptians would consider their grievances satisfied with the execution of Mubarak. Another thrusts a handful of spent 7.62mm ammunition under my nose, and explains his bandaged arm, which he claims happened when the security forces opened fire on protesters here in the square on 8 April. The steelworker says, and many agree, the revolution is not over and they want the return of the money they believe has been stolen from Egypt by the former regime, and "social justice".

Talking to some of the youth who organised things on 25 January, one theme emerges: they worry about, and are struggling to deal with, the power of political Islam. The ones who feel this the most are those who are still trying to interface with the urban poor: teaching literacy classes, agitating for the formation of new parties etc.

"We can't preach in the mosques" says one, ruefully . During the referendum vote on the new constitution, he tells me, thou the official message from Islamist leaders was conciliatory towards the secularist and liberal youth, in the mosques he alleges local imams spread misinformation.

Paradoxically, though the liberal media in the west has gone out of its way not to overyhype the possibility of an Islamist outcome to the Arab spring, this is now what some of the main protagonists of the secular youth actually fear.

The other paradox is the army: it is slowly racheting a crackdown to the right and left: extending the repression and rhetoric against the Mubarak clique at the same time as banning protests, prosecuting certain activists and, as the people I met on Tahrir testified, maintaining a tight grip on poor neighbourhoods.

On the streets though there is an irrepressible optimism; a lot of cheery banter between people. I know this is normal in Egypt but there are still a lot of common casual references to revolutionary events in people's conversations.

Te key will be the elections in September: various parties are struggling to be formed, old opposition politicians vying for influence. Some of the secular youth seem to be fragmenting into their own concerns, almost psychologically resigned to the probability that they cannot "play the game" of mainstream politics. Some are forming new bands, others learning new languages, forming NGOs etc.

These are my impressions: feel free to add to them, disagree, discuss. So far nobody has asked my about the Royal Wedding.

In the last chapter of Kafka's Amerika, there is a scene where Karl, the hero, gets lured into watching, then joining, a grand enterprise called the Grand Nature Theatre of Oklahoma.

As he arrives at the racecourse where the circus is to be staged he hears the sound of trumpets "not playing in tune, just wild playing. But that didn't bother Karl, rather it confirmed to him what a great enterprise the Theatre of Oklahoma was." A disorderly queue forms; nobody is sure what for. Eventually he's offered a job playing the trumpet.

I've come to see this chapter as a giant preview for the digital communications revolution in general, but after queuing for - and eventually being allowed to buy - an iPad 2 it now has a very specific resonance.

You queue; everybody in the queue wants the same thing; everybody is happy, filled with anticipation that they are going to enter the new world if they just wait long enough, answer the right questions, embrace the new experience. You get to the head of a queue and are led upstairs to join the back of a new queue; a bright young person eventually comes to greet you, take your order, sell you an extra foldy thing to cover the screen and then it comes.

You switch it on and... well, yes, you really are in a new continent. You are in the Grand Nature Theatre of Oklahoma. Above all, if you are in the business of news, you are finally back in business.

Five years ago I wrote an article which the Guardian unhelpfully headlined "Rolling News RIP". In it I predicted that, as video and audio content populated the web, the realtime rolling news channel would be replaced by "instant access" content. TV execs had been right, I said, to wage a battle for the rolling news space (ITV had just surrendered), but:

"Rolling news is no longer the future. In 2004 the average broadband household spent 16 hours a week online. As anyone who uses any half-decent news platform on the web understands, the internet is faster, delivers instant depth and unrivalled interactivity. Rolling news - and here I mean the concept of a separate channel and its traditional front-end studio format - is the genre of television least suited to survive the transition to the digital age."

At the time (January 2006) BBC News 24 and Sky News were each being watched for 9 minutes a week by the average viewer, while the ITV offering had garnered two minutes of eyeball time. Fast forward to today and Sky gets ten minutes, while the BBC is achieving 19 minutes. The average weekly reach has moved: Sky got 11.6% then and gets 9.5% today; BBC News 24/Newschannel got 13.2% in 2006 and now gets 18.2%. See latest Barb figures here.

So at one level I was too pessimistic. But on another level I was right - and once you've got an iPad, or one of the rival Android based devices, in your hands you know why.

Apart from the apps I need for writing (Pages and Celtx) and messing around (SmartGo Kifu since you ask) the apps I am using most are those produced by news organizations and for social media.

Twitter is my first port of call because - and this is still stunning to write, even though I've admitted this to myself weeks ago: Twitter is now my primary destination for breaking news.

I follow mainly news people and authoritative tweeters in the USA, China and the Middle East so if I want to know what's going on in Syria today, or Libya, I quickly scroll through the tweets of the people I trust to tell me: often these are retweets of first hand accounts such as:

Nabeel Rajab
Arrest of student at the University of Bahrain Narjis Abdullah after troops stormed a house after breaking the door 3 clock morning #bahrain

(incidentally I don't know if this is true but I can check it out).

After that, what I used to do when I only had an iPhone was scan the newspaper apps: the Guardian's estimable one; the FT's rather grudgingly updated one that costs me an arm and a leg as part of my online sub; the WSJ and NYT and Washington Post and, if I am feeling like a giant headline, Huffington Post.

But not anymore.

Now I go to the broadcasters, above all - for the richness of experience - Sky News. Sky, for the uninitiated, has launched the mother of all news apps for the iPad/tablet audience.

At its centre is a closed and finished piece of video. What we used to call a package. Hovering around this will be all kinds of related content - served in the seamlessly automatic way me and my fellow dotcom execs used to dream of with text only in our failed attempt to create a computing business website for Reed Business Information in the late 1990s.

For example there is a superb five minute (yes five minute, which for the uninitiated is Newsnight-length) VT from Alex Crawford in Misrata. Surrounding it are an image gallery of photos shot by a producer on the scene (yes a producer); a text article with more depth; a table outlining the main Libyan tribes; a quote from President Obama and an annotated map. All are inter-active and if you click on a tab saying back story there is a date-tagged timeline of similar content.

It is comprehensive. And on the iPad, as on other tablets, the whole thing sparkles. Sky shoots in HD. The screen is small but big enough to make HD look really brilliant when held about 2 feet away from you. Though Sky's app has set the industry ablaze, doubtless other news organisations will soon have something just as whizzy. But the TV people are in the lead.

In fact all TV begins to look very good on an iPad: within hours of getting it me and my wife switched off the Ten O'Clock News on the TV and watched it live on the BBC iPlayer instead: it was a better experience in all ways as long as you can avoid getting your Chicken Biryani on the screen.

My big complaint about Sky's app content is that it's not easy to link to it: I can't link you direct to the Alex Crawford report via this blog or via Twitter. In fact the general non-shareability of app content is, well, a bit Kafkaesque.

And that's a shame because my predictions about the TV package are being proved right, though in ways I could not have imagined five years ago. I wrote that rolling news had begun to kill the art of the package:

"Rolling news was always going to be a world of talking heads. In the process, we lost the concept of "story" - an editorial process whose outcome is a narrative with a beginning, middle and end, and hopefully a meaning. During the rise of rolling news that was something we just had to live with. Now we don't.

"The internet as a medium has no fear of the finished narrative: "on-demand" news, downloaded as individual stories or bulletins, fits naturally with the interactive instincts of web users, which they are bringing to broadband TV as it emerges. The finished story also fits in with the economics of broadband. Everything else in this medium is designed to be stored, shared or sold."

Now both the Sky News and BBC News iPad apps are, essentially finished news packages plus supporting text. There is an option to switch to the live output, but I have not found myself using it. What I do is follow the news as it breaks on Twitter or - if I am in the vicinity - the TV: and then click on the finished content on the iPad.

However what's happening to the finished content is also interesting. Right now, running against Sky's Misrata report is a BBC story about the UN probing human rights abuses in Misrata (again - the iPad app is not allowing me any form of link out to this). The video content is an unedited (except for an inpoint and an outpoint) of a head and shoulders announcement by Liam Fox MP, the Defence Secretary, about the use of Predator drones. The story as presented therefore is far more of a montage: here's the written story and here by the way is a bit of original footage of a politician talking.

The Sky package, while it uses all the techniques of shooting and editing we use on Newsnight, is interesting in that it allows people to speak at length; it is informal; the camera joggles about in the burnt-out shelter where a tank has been destroyed. The narrative is much less imposed than it would have been five or ten years ago: we are simply allowed to be there, to follow the Libyan fighters through their rat-runs, shell holes. We are "there". (A horrible thought occurs that it looks very like the Battlefield 3 trailer; I throw in this thought for further discussion.)

On top of news apps there are a growing number of apps that let you construct your own magazine from the content linked-to by people you know or follow on Twitter and Facebook. I've been trying these out - Zite, Flipboard etc. For me they are not so interesting because I am essentially into making my own choices about what to do in a stressed and busy work environment and do not want to read/view other people's trivia served up by an algorhythm that thinks it knows me. However, these personal aggregation apps are another form of digital news that I could not have imagined before.

Finally there are two apps worth mentioning that I think will complete the circle of this news revolution: iMovie and Garage Band. The audio input on the iPad is good enough to broadcast, even without a USB microphone, once edited on Garage Band; the video is not so great and cannot be zoomed; but iMovie again allows you to create and edit "good-enough" video packages.

I don't think it will be long before we start to get broadcast content made on the very devices through which it will be consumed, though you will never achieve great HD for several more iterations of the technology.

Five years ago I thought we would begin to see the replacement of rolling news by non-rolling, and at the same time more instant and less "presented" news content. I had no concept that digital devices like the tablet would come along. Nor that e-Books would take off (I downloaded and found the relevant passage from Kafka's Amerika on the iPad's Kindle app in the first five minutes after I decided to write this post).

What's happening now is the emergence of rich, instant digital content alongside rolling news; plus the emergence of reliable social media as a news source, circumventing the mainstream media and at the same time forcing its agenda (I learned most of what I wanted to know about the Bristol riot from the social media and even now for richness and diversity of coverage of that event and its aftermath, social media beats mainstream).

Now, in the news business, everybody is in the same business. What matters is richness, shareability, and the ability to in some way monetise (for everybody except the BBC) this new, attractive content.

The crucial attribute for tablet news is what I call "sparkleosity": does it move, swoosh, twinkle? Does it invite me do do things with it, share it, come back for more?

I've always said to newspaper execs bewailing the unwillingness of the public to pay for news: build something worthwhile and they will come. Alfred Harmsworth produced 40 dummy issues of a new kind of newspaper before launching it on the world and changing the whole business: it was the Daily Mail and people liked it so much they began to form the same kind of queues to buy it that you now see in the Apple Store (the initial print run of 100,000 had to be upped to 500,000 in six months).

Actually the Daily Mail's website is now booming because it's followed the same instinct: launch something different online to what you get from those blue-black headlines of middle class doom on paper. (Interestingly its iPad app sucks, to offer a personal opinion: it lacks the sparkle of its website - but as I say everbody is just in year Zero).

As it turned out it was not the newspaper men who produced something new and sparkly: it was Steve Jobs, and the guys at Sky who came up with what for me is one of the first apps that totally lives and breathes on the tablet platform.

So, as the billboard shouted to Karl in that fictional mid-western racecourse, so the tablet shouts to news executives everywhere, breathlessly:

"The great Theatre of Oklahoma calls you! If you miss your chance now you miss it for ever! If you think of your future you are one us! Everyone is welcome!"

** Just so I meet all the requirements: as well as the iPad there are numerous tablet devices and they all do roughly the same thing, from Samsung, LG, HP and upcoming Sony. Here's a link to a bunch of them.

Here's the graph issued by Mr Papaconstantinou's office:

It shows that even though the Greek deficit is higher than expected, it has still done better than anybody else in Europe in deficit reduction in a single year. Unfortunately there is no Bafta for this achievement, nor any form of credit in the international sovereign debt market.

Ireland, bailed out for its role as a large, English-speaking quasi-Grand Cayman in the Euro banking system, may have done worst, but it is still the most likely country to achieve leniency. Greece, which on its own figures has made good progress, is now being openly discussed as a candidate for a swift boot up the rear-end out of the zone altogether.

German economic adviser Lars Feld told Italian TV today that Greece should restructure (ie a controlled default): adding of course that Germany could not support such a default.

As we watch the inevitable happen, in slow motion, always preceded by disavowals and denials from those in power, it always calls to mind a paragraph from Orwell's diary on the morrow of the German invasion of the USSR:

"Remarked to X that, for the past few years, have had the feeling of waking up knowing more about what is about to happen in the world than any member of the Cabinet. Less to do with powers of prediction, but with the power to grasp what kind of world we are living in."

Sometimes one graph says it all. Here's one that says quite a lot. In the graph above the little blue crosses indicate the price of wheat in certain countries that have experienced social unrest this year. The further to the top right the cross is, the higher the medium and short term price hike the country has suffered: for wheat and therefore for bread.

Saudi and Algeria are stable, Occupied Palestine, Jordan and Egypt are on the high end of the price spike; Tunisia, Yemen, Morocco and Lebanon significantly high. There is, therefore, a rough - but only - rough correlation between bread prices and revolutions. So far.

However the big splodge of colour in the middle concerns a completely different period in history: the revolutionary wave of 1848. In 2000 economists Helge Berger and Mark Spoerer calculated the scale of bread price inflation in key locations of the revolutionary wave in the era of Marx and Metternich.* Economists at Barings have used that data to produce the chart above, and it makes pretty stunning viewing.

The red triangles show violent revolutions: France, Switzerland, Austria, Prussia, Hungary and a host of German principalities saw violent overthrows correllated with a food price spike.

England, famous for the massive damp-squib Chartist demonstration on Kennington Common, and not much else in 1848 apart from some high-spirited Marseillaise singing in Soho, sits where Saudi sits now: almost no food price inflation. The green squares show places which achieved something similar to what's been happening in the Middle East - immediate constitutional reform on the edge of an insurgent's pitchfork.

There's a lot to be written about this, and nobody would be crazy enough to say food prices were in any way a sole causal factor of 1848 or the revolutions today: but they are clearly contributory factors.

The interesting thing, of course, is that neither the food price spike nor the revolutionary wave has yet subsided in the developing world, so the blue cross part of the graph has to be seen as highly interim. As the Barings guys write:

"There were, undoubtedly, deeper seated causes to the Jasmine Wave than the price of a loaf of bread. But to paraphrase Berger and Spoerer's investigation into the economic causes of the revolutions that rocked Europe in 1848, while food inflation does not provide the brains, it does supply the brawn."**

Makes you think.

* Helge Berger & Mark Spoerer, Economic Crises and the European Revolutions of 1848, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 61, No.2, June 2001, pp293-326.

** Barings Asset Management note: The Sugar Rush and the Jasmine Wave. 20 April 2011.

"Pina is trying to say the most simple things," says Wim Wenders, his voice close to a whisper: "Pina invented an art that is so obvious it's unbelievable that nobody came up with it. Pina is interested in who we are and what moves us."

In 2009 Wenders, the acclaimed film director, was about to begin a documentary collaboration with German choreographer Pina Bausch, chronicling her work at the Tanztheater Wuppertal. But Bausch died suddenly, days before the shoot was to begin:

"I cancelled the film. I pulled the plug - it seemed impossible. And weeks later I realised it was the wrong decision; there was still a film to make about that look and her work. And there was still all these pieces that she'd programmed at the theatre, so we could film it together."

The result is Pina: Dance, dance or we are lost - a visual memorial for Bausch: her work, as always, challenging, troubled and now shot as dance has never been shot - up close and in 3D.

There are Wenders' trademark shots, drifting in and out of the dancers' POV. There is closeness, immediacy; even the rain in Bauch's watery masterpiece Vollmond seems to have mass. Every drop. For Wenders the new medium is a revelation:

"I thought it would be good to be close. And with 3D you not just have a close body you feel the aura of a person. All of a sudden the body has a volume. All of a sudden there is a different physicality that you ever see on a screen. I wanted to take the audience as close as possible to these people and to their horror."

For Wenders the Pina documentary is the latest stage of a long journey. In Wings of Desire he commemorated the last days of Cold War Berlin; with Paris, Texas and Until the End of The World he took the road movie to new extremes - then switched to documentaries, celebrating the music of another iconic city, Havana, in Buena Vista Social Club.

He sees the move to 3D as something historic and irreversible in the development of cinema. But it's a medium that's hardly been explored: there are a dearth of scripts, written to exploit the possibilities, says Wenders:

"I'm working on it. I'm trying to find a story that has that affinity. It's not obvious I must tell you. Cinema has done marvelous things for more that a hundred years with the language we had. We used dollies and put the camera into helicopters and cars and on our shoulders and stuff in order to create the fiction of cinema. Now we have the access - and nobody walks through the door for heaven's sake!"

It was Georges Méliès, in the 1890s, who switched cinema's path of innovation from "how do you make a better camera?" to "how do you mix closeups with wides"? Not stopping there, he moved quickly to multiple exposures; nudity and science fiction. Within ten years of its invention, arguably, all the genres and most of the techniques of 2D moving imagery had been discovered. Now we're at the very beginning of that process with 3D.

Does Wenders think cinema might become closer to the subject with 3D, less reliant on the editing techniques and semi-theatrical shot lists?

"I think it's a very inviting medium to have. [It allows you] to be in the presense of someone. If you are in the presence of somebody you don't have to cut all that much. That presence is more overwhelming. And also [it allows you] to go places. 3D allows you to discover a place in a whole different way. "

"It can transport you there. The horizon is over there - plus you have something close. And you are, as an audience, taken into somebody's world and you can visit it. That's what you could never do in a movie. There was always that distance of the artificial two dimensions. "

"With 3D there is a whole new technology and that is obviously pushed by the industry. And there is also a language. The language has to be used by people who are interested in it; who can extend the realm of expression. And I don't see the studios doing that. They have no interest in that. But that's the history of cinema. It's always been both industry and expression."

Wenders is visibly transported when he speaks about the new medium: his eyes shine. He speaks of 2D cinema as "the flat screen" - ignoring the fact that 3D is merely a flat screen and a pair of crazy spectacles. He speaks of 2D as "movies" and, implicitly, 3D as something else.

He had been in negotiations to direct Wagner's Ring cycle at Bayreuth, and film it in 3D, but talks broke down. So is there anything else he'd like to direct in the new format?

"'Pina' was not a classic documentary because [it involves] chorographers, dance and expression. I would love to use 3D in the classic documentary: go somewhere, into somebody's world."

"The other thing I would like to do is find a story that could use 3D, that could not be done any other way. Over all I feel we have only scratched the surface: there is so much left to discover.

Could he go back to two dimensions?

"Going back is already the expression. I feel that it would be going back. The door is open. I have all these wide spaces now. I want to go there."

Wenders is in London open an exhibition of his stills photography, at the Haunch of Venison. Shooting handheld, on film, as he's done since childhood, he produces giant often empty scenes:

"A lot of my movies start with a desire to explore a place. Most of my movies start with first - a sense of place. Then you have a story and characters and before you know it they take centre stage. And characters take over. And the places necessarily step in the background. In photography I can do the opposite I can give the place the central part and the people who show up are the extras."

Some of Wenders' photographs explicitly reference the look and feel of American painter Edward Hopper. As with Hopper, the loneliest scenes occur when he dispenses with the human subject altogether and conveys the loneliness of a scene by the simple absence of life and movement. How big an influence was Hopper?

"Hopper was a great experience in my life: I was blown away with not only the formats but also the subjects. Cities - lonely people, alienation. In a strange way it coincided with making moves about similar subjects. I was facinated by the cities - I was facinated by the lonesomeness and Hopper became my hero painter. Also, in my photography, I'm more interested in the history of painting than in the history of photography."

Both Wenders and Pina Bausch were products of post-war Germany: both, effectively, ripped up and started afresh their respective genres - Wenders famously improvising an entire film on set in Wings of Desire, the set being the bombed out bohemia of West Berlin in the 1980s; Bausch forced dancers to stumble, eyes closed, through the angst-ridden chair-scape in Café Muller, to beat their chests and hyperventilate a the soil-strewn stage for Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Says Wenders:

"Pina realised she was looking for someone else. Something deeper, something more human something existential. She didn't want to change dance - she said let me start again."

Watch my interview with Wim Wenders on Newsnight, 2230, BBC TWO, 19 April 2011. And on iPlayer for seven days.

"Hey boss we got another one o' those countries getting close to our proprietory benchmark for too much debt!"

"Bring it on! What's the deficit?"

"9.5% of GDP"

"Debt?"

"97%"

"What's the political complextion of the government?"

"Mmm. Tough to tell: got a pinko head of state but a tough minded legislature full o' fiscal hawks."

"So a notch or two downgrade should bring 'em into line? Can we do that before lunchtime?"

"Yeah, but there's a problem. They're about as close to being a 'true sovereign' as you could get. Their currency's pretty crucial to the global economy and they can print it."

"So they're not pegged to the dollar?"

"They are the dollar. The country's called America."

"Yikes. I see the problem. Technically speaking this America place prints the global currency of last resort so it can inflate away its own debts, devalue the currency, impose the cost o' crisis onto everybody else."

"Yeah well that's what they did last time."

"There was a last time?"

"Sheesh I was forgetting, you came thru on the fast track from business school. You don't remember the Plaza Accord? 1985?"

"Heck I was 10 years old!"

"OK well, the 101 version is: the US negotiated with Japan and Germany to depreciate the dollar by 50% relative to their currencies enabling them to recover from recession and slash their trade deficit."

"Cool and the Germans and Japanese just agreed?"

"Yup. America had moral authority and Germans and Japanese were seen as rising power, a bit like China now."

"Great Google-bee! Ay-and what happened to them."

"Well the Japanese suffered a property boom and bust and then..."

"Ah, that bit we did do at B-school. Boom, bust, stagnation. Wow. So this America place: they can just boss the world around and tell 'em what to do. They can use their global-status currency to offset the costs of fiscal adjustment and basically make other folks pay the cost while they go on spending?"

"Well this is the problem. That's a moot issue now. These guys spend, what, something like $700bn a year on defense? But for some reason now they've taken to not invading places. They've got supposed allies all over the earth who don't seem to do their bidding. There is, well, a slight sense of the unravelling of global power."

"Okay this is serious. Has the president guy got a deficit reduction plan?"

"Plans to eliminate it over a 12 year period. It's a long timescale but pretty tough."

"And the legislature?

"Some of em believe the world was created 3,000 years ago! They'd run a budget surplus tomorrow if we asked them."

"And this place is triple-A, right?"

"Right."

"And the technical chance of them defaulting on their debt is?"

"Well unless some kind of alien invasion happens, leading to civil war and mass starvation, dengue fever, millenarian sects take over the seats of power etc. Zero."

"So whadda we do?"

"OK, well there's an election coming. And they keep having these ridiculous political stand-offs over ideological differences in the budget, leading to all kinds of weird threats to shut down the state."

"No kidding?"

"So while the technical possibility of default is zero - there is a greater than technical possibility that we, ourselves, will take em down a notch because of all these political shenanighans. Political paralysis is real, no?"

"Ah! I am getting a lightbulb above my head."

"Yup. We could put em on negative watch."

"We could."

"We could put pressure on them to eliminate the deficit faster than planned by issuing an 'outlook negative' warning. Which is, as you know, a warning that we ourselves could issue a warning."

"But that could be seen as political pressure: intervening into the political debate in the most powerful country in the world. Do we really want to court controversy after all that stuff with the banks?"

"That's very wise boss. That's why you are the boss."

"So whadda we do?"

"I propose we wait and see what S&P do, first."