Most bubbles look idiotic when seen with hindsight” – and that includes the one that led up to the 2008 implosion.

This is the view from Tullett Prebon, a London-based firm that operates as a broker (mainly in the wholesale financial and energy sectors).

Tullett Prebon global economic strategy head Tim Morgan has written an astonishing paper, Perfect Storm: Energy, finance and the end of growth, that rips apart with forensic skill any illusions we may have that the global economy is back on an even keel.

He argues that the 2008 collapse is still with us and, five-and-a-half years later, we are no closer to resolving it.

There is also a great chapter on globalisation, the idiocy thereof – it is great vindication for all of those who nursed suspicions that shipping our manufacturing off to Asia but nevertheless keeping on spending up big was not a good thing but were too afraid to say so lest we be howled down by the economic conformists.

Morgan sees the first decade of this century not as we do, as the great commodity boom that lifted Australia out of the doldrums.

He sees the global boom and the ensuing 2008 bust as eclipsing every other mania, from the Tulip bubble to the 1920s.

He cites as part of that most recent excess the bubbles in commodities such as oil (almost $US150 a barrel at one stage), rhodium and uranium.

In respect of the last, the spot price reaching $136 a pound and with something like 260 Australian Securities Exchange-listed companies in 2007 proclaiming they had uranium projects certainly walks like a bubble and quacks like one.

Morgan clearly sees the commodities boom as a creature of the massive credit injection – with the obvious corollary that turning off the credit tap will have its consequences for commodity demand.

The latest tapering overnight won’t help.

What is of particular concern, if you accept Morgan’s thesis, is that we are becoming more bubble-prone. (In our own neck of the woods, we had two more recent ones: rare earths in 2011 and graphite in 2012.)

He argues that the big difference between the recent super cycle and previous bubbles lay in timing.

A gap of more than 80 years elapsed between the tulip mania of 1636-37 and the South Sea Bubble of 1720.

There was an even longer time gap until the next bubble: the British railway mania of the 1840s.

Then, as far as Morgan is concerned, the next biggie was the lead up to the 1929 crash.

Then there was a long gap until the 1980s when, as he puts it, Japanese asset values lost contact with reality.

But now we no longer have any large gaps between bubbles.

Following close on the heels of Japan’s real estate mania came the dotcom bubble of 1995-2000 (and there must be a few red faces still at the thought of how many juniors fell for it as a way out of their troubles).

As Morgan puts it: “Historians of the future are likely to marvel at the idiocy which attracted huge values to companies which lacked earnings, cash flow or proven track record.”

Then we saw a whole sequence of bubbles.

There was insanity in the property markets in the US, Britain, Ireland, Spain, China and Romania.

On their heels came the big blow-outs in uranium and rhodium (and, one might add, phosphate).

And now we get to the part that will be of interest to those trying to figure out what comes next for commodity prices (and, therefore, what portends for metal prices).

There’s no big turnaround on the horizon, apparently.

Morgan argues that the scale and the scope of the 2008 crash far exceeded anything that had gone before.

He thinks the losses will far exceed the minimum estimate of $4 trillion (about 5.7% of global GDP).

“The rash of bubbles suggests that recent years have witnessed the emergence of a distinctive new trend, which is described here as a credit super cycle, a mechanism which compounds individual bubbles into a broader pattern,” Morgan argues.

Unlike previous bubbles, there are three underlying factors threatening growth (and commodity demand).

They are the “vast folly” of globalisation, which has weakened the West; the undermining of the accuracy of official economic and fiscal data (so we don’t really know what’s happening); and the decline of surplus supplies of energy – the energy that drives global economic growth.

The commodity boom may have had us all fooled.

If the global economic system doesn’t recover, neither will metal prices.