Just over a week ago, a "return to growth" in the economy, was announced with great fanfare, in the form of a tiny increase in overall production during the last quarter of 2009.

But does this really herald the much trumpeted "recovery", that politicians and the media have been talking so much about over the past months? Or is it a mere statistical blip in the downward slide of an economy, squeezed dry by financial speculation and capitalist greed?

The reality is, that whatever the statistics may say, the working class has not seen the smallest hint of recovery in its day-to-day conditions - quite the opposite. And, in fact, it turns out that the financial "experts" of big business are not too sure about it themselves.

Speculative quicksands

One of their problems is that things seem to be going wrong again on the stock market.

Last March, the government's launch of its £200bn injection of fresh cash into the financial system kickstarted a new wave of stock market speculation. Share prices went up continuously. In the 12 months up to this January, they increased by almost 2/3 in the rich countries.

Of course the same politicians who were bragging about a "recovery" being "round the corner", did not say a word about the rising speculative profits on the stock market. Especially as this speculation, which was mostly financed with public money, accounted for a significant proportion of the "unexpectedly high" profits announced by the biggest banks by the end of the year.

However, in January, what the "experts" had described so far as an inexorable rise, began to falter. Over the past 3 weeks, share prices have gone down again, wiping out more or less all the gains made during the previous 3 months. In short, by now, the finance sharks may well be using the government's £200bn cash injection to gamble on a fall in the stock market - either way, they could not care less about the consequences of their bets, as long as the profits are fat!

Time-bombs left by the crisis

But the stock market is not the main worry of the "experts", though. After Iceland and Ireland, Greece is now threatened with bankruptcy. And Greece is not alone among the industrialised countries to be in this position - Portugal and Spain are dangerously close behind.

Financial difficulties in these countries all have the same cause - the colossal cost of bailing out their respective capitalists since the beginning of the credit crunch.

The scent of blood is known to attract sharks. Speculators are now betting on Greece going bust, thus causing financial havoc in Greece itself, but also threatening chaos on the international currency markets, where they are betting on a fall in the value of the euro. Meanwhile, Greece's creditors are using this opportunity to demand higher interest rates on their loans, thereby strangling the country even more.

The scale of this new development in the crisis is such that more and more "experts" are beginning to talk about a possible "double dip" - or replication - of the credit crunch. Others are even more pessimistic (or lucid?), saying that what is now happening in Greece may well be the beginning of the "real crisis".

The real problem is the system

What these new developments are showing is that the measures which were described to us by politicians as the best "medicine" against the crisis, are now threatening to compound it.

This should not come as a surprise. After all, isn't this "medicine" already showing that it does not work, by threatening the livelihood of the working class here?

Britain is not bankrupt - not yet, although this could happen. But already, politicians of all stripes insist that the only option for the working class is to agree to more "sacrifices" at work and more austerity measures - to boost the bosses' profits and fill the financial black hole created by the bankers! And this is exactly what workers protested against in near-bankrupt Ireland last year and what they are striking against today in Greece.

The simple fact that the system's "medicine" to cure its own crisis should result in a whole section of the working class being pushed into poverty is, in and of itself, a condemnation. But if, as it turns out, the "medicine" only perpetuates and even amplifies the crisis - this only means that the system cannot be mended. It must be replaced!