This week Damien Hirst made enough money from flogging a dead shark to buy a merchant bank, while stockbrokers probably harboured thoughts of pickling their chief executives in similar style.

And even as the stockmarkets tumbled – and America contemplated nationalising AIG, then insured the economy by bailing it out – HP announced plans to shed 24,600 jobs worldwide. Yes folks, welcome to the new world of down-scything.

But wait. Unlike the jobs culled from, say, Lehman Brothers, these sweeping cuts were designed to give Wall Street a spring in its step rather than push it from the window ledge (onto the horns of the famous bull donated by Merrill Lynch, perhaps).

The cuts will streamline the newly merged HP and EDS and focus it long term on the enterprise, said a decidedly non-pickled Mark Hurd. "The enterprise is big," he said to financial analysts. "It's attractive for us, and it's heading our way."

The only thing that's been heading towards big business this week has been the Grim Reaper, so any more deliberate scything of the chaff has to be a good thing. The aim, said HP, is to have twice as many sales staff as propellerheads, while increasing the number-crunching power of the business.

HP has digested thirty companies in four years, continued Hurd – sounding more and more like IBM did at the turn of the century: big and blue and on the prowl for more.

Indeed: it's strange how the passing of just a few weeks has made this merger seem like the last hurrah of a bygone age.

At present, though, tech stocks are one of the things propping up the US economy, so let's hope Hurd grabbed people's attention as he set out to do.

Dell stocks were on the slide this evening, though, on rumours of a fall-off in PC demand. Services are where it's at, it seems.

Meanwhile, global speculator George Soros said he believed the world economy is still heading into the storm, not out of it.

What's certain is that the economy is being torn asunder by a mix of short-termism (fears this week over falling oil prices, while a fortnight ago were fretting about their rise) and the need to establish a more stable long-term version of the 'free market'.

The one thing needed at such times is strong leadership, unity, and a story people can believe in, so it beggars belief that the British Government has chosen this week to stab itself in the back. Maybe it thought no-one was looking.

But perhaps it is taking a leaf from Hurd's book and planning to be a leaner, meaner machine next year – under similarly strong leadership.