It was warm on Saturday night…and for once there was no cloudburst in the afternoon to soak the Rye Bonfire on The Salts. I had spent the afternoon in Ashford and came back to Rye on a packed 1730 train bringing hundreds of revellers from all over Kent and Sussex to Rye’s Guy Fawkes Celebrations.

Vemara had a Grandstand View of the Fireworks Display set off on the opposite bank. But first was the procession through the town. So at 7.30 pm it was up the Ypres Steps, through St Mary’s Churchyard, down Lion Street and along the High Street to The Mint. But I was back on Vemara by nine o’clock. This was my second free show of the Fireworks Season. Last Sunday…on the real November the Fifth…I had joined Françoise de Naillat on her balcony in St Leonard’s. Money is still no object for people. Fireworks are cheap…and the bank rate is still only five percent.

It is so easy to transfer manufacturing to low-cost economies that Dell, Nokia, Ikea, Glaxo and L’Oréal sell everywhere and produce nowhere. By outsourcing their manufacturing these Global Gamblers leave themselves with just the Design and Marketing.

But Manufacturing is volatile and capital-intensive so outsourcing transfers Economic Volatility of Capital Investment and Inventory Cycles alongside the Job Slavery and the Dark Satanic Mills. Trade Surpluses used to indicate Economic Dynamism but in this World Gone Mad (WGM) a reluctance to integrate fully with the Global Economy and pursue WTO-style Free Trade is regarded as evidence of a need for destabilisation.

In Britain and the United States, globalisation seems to have brought economic stability and made borrowing safe. Integration of global capital markets has also allowed countries with a high Propensity to Borrow…like America, Britain and Spain…to take advantage of the Private Savings of more cautious cultures like Japan and Germany.

Nobody can explain any of this…and nobody seems to believe that it can go any other way than to Crash. This is one thing where the opinion of the Man in the Street is little different from that of the Academic Economist in her Ivory Tower and the City Banker in his Knightsbidge Palace. The difference is that ordinary people are now talking openly about The Crash and no longer feel the need to keep up the pretence that what is going on makes any sense.

Finance-led globalisation has opened a Pandora’s Box with the tails of the Merchant Class wagging the dog of the Statesmen. At the end of the 19th century when Britain ruled the waves no one had the vaguest notion that a hundred years hence imperial expansion would lead to Reverse Colonisation and Intra-Diaspora Global Trading.

Forty years ago Enoch Powell insisted there were questions to be addressed. And forty years before that Mahatma Gandhi glimpsed the shape of things to come when he addressed the Manchester Textile Workers. But not even his visionary mind was capable of grasping the idea that three quarters of century hence an Indian Steel Company would buy the Mighty Steelworks of South Wales…lock, stock and barrel. But that is exactly what happened last month.

In the late 19th century in the days of the British Raj the 130-room Watson Hotel in downtown Bombay was the classiest place in town. There is a legend that Jamshedji Tata…a Parsi textile trader and the founding father of India’s foremost industrial house…was so angry to be turned away at its richly carpeted door on the ground that he had brown skin that he built his own luxury hotel in defiance. The Tata Group’s majestic Taj Mahal Hotel overlooking the Gateway of India is now the place to be seen in Mumbai for anybody who is anybody.

Meanwhile the sad-looking building that was once Watson’s is home to nondescript law firms, courier companies and photocopying shops. Watson Hotel stands as a salutary lesson to those who underestimate the ambitions of Indian Businessmen.

With last month’s £4.3 billion takeover of Corus…once British Steel and the very epitome of Western Industrialism and British Imperial Strength…Ratan Tata, the Indian Group’s present-day patriarch has proved that Indian Business is a force to reckon with globally. There is a whole lot more to Indian Business than Call Centres.

Instead of being acquired Indian Companies are now acquiring. Ranbaxy Laboratories is a top player in the European Generic Drug market after buying RPG Aventis; Mahindra has picked up Stokes a British automotive forging company, the tractor manufacturing assets of China’s Jiangling Motor and the German Jeco Holdings; Vijay Mallya’s UB Group is planning a £400 million bid for Scotland’s Whyte & Mackay. Where will it all end? Globalisation will have too much impact on the future of too many people to be left to Merchants and Moneylenders.