Something like a strange scent of unreality floats over this month of June. While the whole world confronts a deep recession after receiving a colossal financial shock, everything is happening as though that page were already turned. The financial markets are getting carried away by the green shoots they take for a sign of spring. In the United States, the banks don't want to have anything more to do with the government. They are falling over one another to reimburse public assistance and so liberate themselves from an awkward guardianship. The dozens of official bodies charged with financial regulation will undoubtedly continue to toil, each in its own corner, thus preventing any systemic vision of the markets. And the Obama team will have more and more difficulty getting new laws passed on bonuses, which nonetheless operated as an incentive to take excessive risks. Financiers want to believe that the crisis is over, while Congress has barely begun to get ready to act. Finan ce time goes infinitely faster than the legislators' time.

    In Europe, it's no better. In the United Kingdom, voices are raised to explain the degree to which more serious financial regulations will harm the future of the City, the country's economic lung. In France, Patrick Devedjian, who had thought he'd picked up the great Recovery Ministry, today presents a report on this stage of the French plan to support economic activity to the most complete indifference. And, at the level of the Union, the great financial stewards are just now beginning to consider the possibility of advancing a proposal - which has been sadly missing the last few months - for a single regulator. It's likely people will be talking about that again in ten years.

    And yet ... Even though it would be more pleasant to proclaim the crisis over, there is no denying that it is only beginning. Debt is making holes everywhere, in the accounts of companies, individuals and governments. We are acting like a sick person who leaves the hospital just after escaping a heart attack, having changed neither his diet nor his life style, without even having the necessary tests done to determine whether he is still at risk in the short term. We have not learned any lessons from the crisis. At the risk of very soon undergoing a still greater shock.

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    Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.