To hell in a handcart

Now that the Olympics are over, it's back to auld claes and porridge.  The two week interregnum seems to have done little for the world economy.  The Guardian sums up the position:

So, this is a world in which the Bank of England has bought a third of UK gilts, a world in which the Federal Reserve has pumped trillions of dollars into the US economy for fear the money supply will collapse, a world in which the ECB props up European banks so they can buy government bonds nobody else will touch, and a world in which China can keep its growth model functioning only through manipulation of the exchange rate and unproductive investment. Apparently, this is the "new normal". There doesn't, to be frank, seem much normal about it.