We are living in extraordinary times, and this makes predicting the nature of the post-credit crunch landscape increasingly difficult. Unfortunately, unlike the Isaac Mendes character from the US TV drama Heroes, I do not have the ability to paint visions of the future on canvas by going into a kind of hypnotic trance. However, what I can say is that perhaps the major lesson of the past month or so is that what seems unthinkable is likely to become inevitable; i.e. the least probable scenario is what will happen.

If you were to go back in time to January 2001, at the start of the Bush presidency, and tell him (and the rest of the world) that by late 2008, he would be overseeing the nationalisation of parts of the US banking sector, no-one would have believed you – especially in light of Bush’s dislike of ‘big government’. Yet that is precisely what happened. And that is why sometimes it is better to turn to fiction for clues about what the future holds.

When I think back to other major events of the past generation, the same is true. For example, virtually no mainstream Sovietologist (of which there were hundreds) predicted the collapse of the USSR. Indeed, hardly anyone was predicting this even at the start of 1991! Yet by December of that year, the Supreme Soviet voted not only to dissolve itself, but the Soviet Union too!

However, I can name at least one fiction book that did indeed predict the collapse of the USSR, and that was the late Donald James’ The Fall of the Russian Empire. Published in 1982, it foresaw the break-up in 1987, not in the precise manner it happened of course, but nor was it way off the mark.

Regarding 9/11, many policymakers seemed to be caught by surprise by that event. Former UK prime minister Tony Blair said in a speech some time afterwards that ‘if I’d told you on September 10 that there was a terrorist group called al-Qaeda planning to hijack planes and crash them into the World Trade Center, you wouldn’t have believed me’ (paraphrased). However, in retrospect we should not have been surprised at all. 9/11 was foreshadowed in an earlier al-Qaeda plot, ‘Operation Bojinka’, in 1994. The plan envisaged exploding a dozen US-bound airliners that had taken off from airports in the Far East.

Furthermore, in the realm of fiction, the 1995 Kurt Russell/Steven Seagal film Executive Decision predicted a 9/11-style suicidal airliner hijacking. Indeed, the destruction of the WTC was reminiscent of scenes from the 1996 Roland Emmerich movie Independence Day. The core aspects of 9/11 were also seen in the first three Die Hard films – an attack on a skyscraper (1988), airliners (1990), and New York (1995). Going further back, the 1982 Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman) novel The Running Man (later filmed with Arnold Schwarzenegger, though differing from the book) concludes with a commercial airliner crashing into a city skyscraper.

Thus, given how wrong so many economists and policymakers were in not anticipating the current economic crisis, I will eagerly be awaiting the first novel or Hollywood movie about the credit crunch for what the world might look like afterwards. In the meantime, here are some crazy thoughts on events we might see:

• The collapse of the Eurozone and a new Franco-German struggle.

• A feminist revolution in Saudi Arabia.

• A US war with India.