A tsunami has hit the world's financial institutions this year, wreaking carnage in the past month. It has toppled giants, turned princes into paupers and prompted governments to make the most drastic economic intervention seen since the New Deal.

There is wide agreement that we are witnessing a once-in-a-lifetime financial 'apocalypse', but scant consensus as to what caused it. Every view can be heard in the din of analysis - from those who perceive nothing more than the normal cycle of the market, to those who want to impeach capitalism itself.

It is inevitable, therefore, that no consensus at all exists on where we go from here. So unprecedented are the dimensions of this crisis that even the most expert among us are struggling to make sense of it, let alone fix it. So much of how it is ultimately defined depends on the course of economic events over the coming year. The jury is still out. Governments have stepped into a vipers’ nest of bad debt and febrile public opinion and the public court of blame has yet to aquit anyone.

To try to make sense of what is happening Demos asked a group of renowned experts to write an essay answering a simple question – what next? We published their answers on Wednesday in a collection of essays called After the Apocalypse. The question was broad because of the scale of the crisis and the necessary scale of our response. The answers are fascinating, and far from unanimous.

As Phil Collins, Demos’ chair of trustees with whom I edited the volume, points out in the introduction, the danger is that bad times lead to bad policy. As the G20 prepare to meet, the quality of analysis and the debate that the world now has about the crisis is critical to making the right choices. We hope that this unprecedented assembly of expertise will help in a small way to serve that purpose.

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