One witticism circulating about the Internet endlessly — and by fax previously, for those of you old enough to remember when the fax machine was trs chic — is the six phases of a project. These are, in chronological order: enthusiasm, disillusionment, panic, search for the guilty, punishment of the innocent, and praise and honors for non-participants.

This process must be scale-independent, for it applies to global central banks and finance ministries, operating both as separate entities and in coordination with each other, as well as to small groups within companies.

How else can we explain the phenomenon — increasingly observable in 2008 — that once a country’s sovereign credit rating deteriorates, its borrowing costs fall and its currency, at least temporarily, rises?

If this is not a perverse rewarding of the guilty, then what is?