If we do not have good news in 2009 then we will certainly have very bad news, both locally and globally, because 2008 showed that we have to rethink everything that we took for granted since World War II. The good news will involve finding ways to provide our populations with the minimum necessary for a dignified and meaningful life while guaranteeing the individual's freedom to develop according to his or her ambitions and capabilities. The challenge will be in devising a new system of minimal but effective government in a marriage with individual freedom and a market economy. Leaving things to drift along as they are now will lead to greater unrest within societies and greater turmoil in the world. It is time for ideas, time for new ways of looking at the world, its problems and its possible solutions.

The global economy is in a mess. The chain reaction began over a year ago when the giant pyramid scheme which was built on providing huge mortgages to U.S. citizens who could not afford them began to collapse. The financial services sector as we knew it, which had been skimming the profits off this collective madness, is now on the scrapheap of history. For once, even the rich have lost great fortunes as the crisis uncovers the fraud on which so many investments were based.

The world is looking for new ways to finance growth, at a time when trust has collapsed and major economies are in recession. This means that the effects of the global problem are hitting individuals in many - if not most - countries. Jobs, pensions, schools, hospitals and other foundations of our society are in jeopardy. In our democracies, we have a social contract in which the population remains docile even when dissatisfied with the government, waiting for its opportunity to change things at the next election. In Greece we have seen what happens when this contract is undermined: a policeman's killing of a 15-year-old boy on Dec. 6, sparked widespread rioting, in which anti-establishment groups took over the protest and, in effect, destroyed the economy of central Athens, sending shock waves through a Europe that is terrified of the social fallout of the economic crisis.

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