Most days are like the days that preceded them: There is nothing surprising about them.

Often, the late summer days drift onward - like the changing of the seasons - with such slight variations one day to the next that you hardly notice. But then, a couple of months later, you suddenly need to put on your winter coat.

We don't know yet if that is the drift of the seasons in the stock market - from warm to cold. It is too soon to tell. "Economic worries weigh on Wall Street," says the International Herald Tribune. The article tells us that there was no recovery for the Dow yesterday.

Meanwhile, the Financial Times puts the world economic situation into dreary perspective:

"The world economy is growing quickly but is rapidly becoming more imbalanced," says the FT. We would have used the word "unbalanced" in the way that, say, the Mad Gasser of Mattoon was unbalanced...or a man who thinks he is Napoleon Bonaparte is unbalanced.

"Foreigners are building up stocks of U.S. assets, keeping U.S. interest rates low and supporting the U.S. dollar," the narrative continues, "but their willingness to continue financing U.S. consumers' taste for imported goods at low interest rates cannot last forever."

So far, so good...this has been The Daily Reckoning view of things for several years. But the FT fails to quit while it is ahead:

"Economists and policymakers know the greatest challenge for the world economy is to reduce these financial imbalances, without killing the prospects for continued healthy world economic growth."

Here, we have to pause to draw breath.

We have made a new friend, Lila, who is helping us to understand things like this. It is all based on a huge and unnatural pretension; we think she is trying to tell us that policymakers understand and control the global economy; that carefully considered action produces anticipated reaction; and that the entire world can be modeled, manipulated, and browbeaten.

Of course, the FT's statement makes no sense. How could current "growth" be "healthy" if it produces a more unbalanced world? It is as if a crazy man were taking medicine that, according to his doctors, worked very well, except for the fact that it made him crazier. But neither policymakers, nor FT economists, can imagine a world in which there is no lever they can pull, no knob they can turn, no reason they can exercise...to produce the desired outcome.

The imbalance to which the FT refers is the increasing division between one group of people who spend money they don't have, and another group that sells things to them. As "growth" continues, the first group goes further and further into debt (becoming poorer) and the second group builds more and more capacity, so that it can make more things the first group cannot afford to pay for. Both groups are making old-fashioned mistakes (one spending too much...the other producing too much) that can only be corrected in an old-fashioned way: With regrets, recriminations and restructuring.

There are no magic levers...no miracle knobs. Instead, there is only a footnote in the Policymakers' Manual: "Warning, despite your conceits and delusions, you usually get what you've got coming."

Bill Bonner is the President of Agora Publishing.  For more on Bill Bonner, visit The Daily Reckoning.