I almost used the title “Feels like June… 29th 1914″.

Kaiser Kuo over at Ogilvy Digital China Watch wonders if he is witnessing “the beginning of the Great Unravelling“, and I know exactly what he means.

Carlyle Capital collapsing… Bear Sterns going under… and no-one knows how much further or how much worse it will get but enough people are now saying that this could be as bad as the Great Depression to seriously worry me. The dollar at record low, gold and oil at record highs… Even back in 2004, when I was considering whether or not to take my MBA, Stephen Roach at Morgan Stanley was warning about the US housing market, and now it’s happened - and seems to be taking everything else with it.

And now Tibet… There’s a lot I want to say here but I haven’t time; but the very last thing we need now is a humiliated China, whose people were ,genuinely, eagerly anticipating the Olympics only to find them boycotted, for reasons that the ordinary man on the street doesn’t understand. We do truly need the Chinese people to feel that they have joined world society, and for the Games to be a success. But that’s not even addressing the elections in Taiwan and, later, the US - which, in an atmosphere of economic collapse, are going to be even more polarized than ever. Let’s just hope that ‘hope’ wins out over fear.

And new clashes in the Balkans

Wow. What a mess. How did we get here?

People waking up on June 29 1914, the day after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, may have sensed that their world had changed. Some, perhaps, were aware that in an interlinked world, the collapse of a small part might bring the rest smashing down. Looking at the headlines today, I sense tremors.

Take a deep breath. Hope that it will be OK.