Interest rates policy has bedevilled the West ever since Alan Greenspan first put the Fed on the floor in the wake of 9/11. With rates finally returning to realistic levels, we're seeing the impact of what you might call a two decade bubble: banks being squeezed to breaking point.

Philip Pilkington is angry at what he sees as central banks using their rates policy as a thermostat 'to turn consumer demand up or down'.

Meanwhile, Germany has just recorded a ten per cent dip in industrial output - the largest fall on record. After WWII, Roosevelt's Secretary of State Hans Morgenthau once wanted to return the Ruhr industrial lands to pasture, and make Germany eternally toothless. Will the country's energy policy succeed where he failed? More broadly, is this the moment at which Europe joins Britain in the club of so-called 'service economies': its industrial base outsourced and rotted away?

Finally, Andrew Collingwood returns to a long-forgotten conflict: the Syrian Civil War. Unremarked upon, the war is at an effective end, and the country is to be readmitted to the Arab League, more than a decade since it was expelled.

Bashar al-Assad will return to a changed Middle East. New alliances. New faces. What does his victory against the odds - and with Russian help - tell us about the failures of Western foreign policy, and what can still be redeemed?