If there's one man who hasn't been swept off his feet by the prospect of Barack Obama in the White House, it's Jim Rogers. "Barack Obama has two policies to speak of," he told attendants at the World Money Show in Westminster. First, he wants to tax capital, just when capital is at its weakest. And second, he wants to protect American jobs. Both ideas are absolutely disastrous, reckons Rogers.

You only have to look at the experience of Japan. The Japanese were determined to protect and prop up their faltering businesses in the nineties, but all it did was leave them with a load of zombie banks. All that happens when you tax capital to prop up failing businesses is that you take money from the competent and give it to the incompetent, says Rogers. This has never worked. "The best hope for America is that everything Obama has said so far has just been rhetoric".

In the opening scene of the 1996 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, a rag-tag group of minor Hollywood celebrities gathered to bury a cause that had failed to ignite. Crowded around a grave in a Hollywood cemetery, Baywatch actors and bit-part filmstars bowed their heads as an electric car was laid to rest.

With the credit crunch hitting banking balance sheets across the world, most firms have been finding loans hard to come by. But US banks have been happy to open their doors to medical groups. With aging baby boomers seeking cheap outpatient care, and nursing homes reaching full capacity, firms building or investing in medical facilities have been able to secure large revolving credit lines, says Sui-Lee Wee in The Wall Street Journal.

It's not too surprising that banks see them as a sound bet, even in the downturn. Around 35 million people aged 65 and over were living in the US at the turn of the century. That number will more than double by 2030. That means the queue of greying baby boomers demanding treatments will only get longer for the foreseeable future.

There’s nothing like a sharp rise in prices to make people come to their senses. Environmental groups have been trying to tell governments that our oil-fueled lifestyle was unsustainable since the 1970s, but nobody was going to pay any attention until oil hit $100 a barrel. Now we have truckers on slow-drive protests, striking oil workers holding entire economies to ransom, and commuters leaving their cars at home. Even the Americans seem to be overcoming their fondness for SUVs. 

The story is the same with food, says Morgan Stanley analyst Robert Feldman. Just as the soaring crude oil price is warning us that we need to find alternative, more efficient energy sources, global grain markets are telling us we have to eat more efficiently.

The dust hasn’t yet cleared on the collapse of America’s construction industry, but the fallout is there for everyone to see. Residential construction sites have ground to a halt in the cities as cranes are drawn down and labourers laid off. In suburbia, new-builds have been abandoned as first-time buyers are cut off from credit.

And now, out in the country, it’s the turn of the timber companies. Wood has been piling up at lumber mills across America as prices plunge below the cost of production. American lumber consumption is expected to drop from 64 billion board feet in 2006 to 43 billion board feet this year. That’s equal to the total output of the top 20 US lumber producers last year.