IF you're of a certain age, Collie Buddz' brand of bleached reggae only sounds about as authentic as Pat Boone's sanitised version of R&B did to fans of what was called "race music" in the 1950s. Be that as it may, Bermuda's resident pop star is enjoying a Boone-like worldwide vogue by packaging black music in an appealingly bland way for largely white and suburbanised black audiences.

Perhaps to enhance his street cred, he's taken to rummaging around in the storeroom of Rastafarian tropes and traditions and now styles himself as the Johnny Appleseed - or, more accurately, Johnny Hempseed - of the international reggae scene, encouraging his audiences to fire up their spliffs and put some marijuana-induced distance between themselves and reality.

His recent proselytising on behalf of his drug of choice at the Bermuda Music Festival drew appreciative cheers from his fans and equally predictable jeers from the prohibitionist lobby.

But regardless of your views on marijuana, Buddz really should quit with the evangelising.

Because, frankly, the last thing Bermudians need is to start behaving even more like a herd of cheerfully tranquilised sheep than is the case already. With Bermuda now staring into the economic abyss, there are already too many blank expressions and glazed eyes around here.

The reality is many of us are in permanent states of denial about having grown overly dependent on wishful economic thinking. And we are about to go cold turkey without having any choice whatsoever in the matter.

Bermuda is less a mid-Atlantic city state than it is an overly precious theme-park for Conspicuous Consumerism: Living Well Beyond Our Means World. This is an island which boasts not only the highest rate of personal debt in the world but a Government that's taken to deficit financing in much the same way Michael Phelps took to his first backyard wading pool. This is an island where the economy is now perilously balanced atop a single wobbly pillar, one that's increasingly at risk from both the catastrophic domino effect now underway in global money markets as well as fickle domestic political policies which send entirely self-contradictory messages to the financial services industries we depend on. This is an island where an enchanted, credit-buttressed way of life can in fact be erased as quickly as those ornate, fairyland palaces and follies dotting the Horseshoe Bay foreshore after the annual Sandcastle Competition once the high tide comes in.

Generally exercises in economic analysis holds about as much appeal as dissecting a frog in a high school biology class. No one is particularly interested (they never are until the flying debris from a collapsing economy impacts them directly in the pocketbook). And the poor frog dies, of course.

But given the current, genuinely dire circumstances Bermudians need to shake themselves out of their collective reverie and start preparing for the coming impact of a rapidly contracting economy. The cause of the ongoing panic in the world's financial markets stems from the convergence of three separate but not entirely unrelated factors.

First, the US banks encouraged millions of Americans to pursue the dream of home ownership whether or not they could afford to, creating the so-called sub-prime market that was as bound fail as any Ponzi Scheme and simultaneously encouraging an exorbitant rise in housing values that was not just unrealistic but ultimately surrealistic.

Secondly, since the days of the Clinton Administration the politicians in Washington, encouraged by Wall Street's captains of financial industry (who, perhaps not uncoincidentally, are also their chief campaign contributors), systematically set about dismantling a carefully constructed system of market safeguards all the while ignoring the entirely predictable consequences of these rash actions.

Third, many major financial institutions, propelled by what seems to have been terminal greed, began to disregard risk in a manner that would likely even raise eyebrows at a Gamblers' Anonymous convention.

The end result is the situation we now find ouselves in with the world's economy on the eve of wholesale and indiscriminate debt- and inflation -driven destruction.

Ever since the insurance/reinsurance gusher began to spurt money here in the late 1980s, Bermudians have subscribed, en masse, to the shared delusion that we somehow inhabited a protective financial bubble, one that would somehow safeguard us from the vagaries of international market fluctuations in perpetuity. Bermudian thinking became as very marooned from global economic realities as the island is geographically isolated from the rest of the world.

The chief flaw in this thinking, of course, was the failure to recognise that all bubbles eventually burst. And when they do there's not just the immediate carnage to contend with but long-lasting and widespread collateral damage. The fortunes of Bermuda's primary-and-only industry are now very much at risk as a result of wild swings on the international financial markets that read like the fever chart of a Yellow Fever victim in his death-agonies. And, as a direct consequence, the superficially enviable and robust Bermudian Way of Life might also be requiring the Last Rites sooner than we might like to think.

For the last 20 years successive Governments have encouraged a seemingly limitless number of off-shore financial service industries to set up shop in our extremely limited land area. This led to the hyperinflationary spiral in Bermuda's cost of living, with far too much money in mad pursuit of far too few resources (when certain condominiums now come with $4 million price tags, how could this type of economic scenario ever have been viewed as sustainable?).

Simultaneously, as they watched wave after wave of these cash-flush firms wash up on our shores, the stewards of our economy entirely failed to diversify Bermuda's economic base despite the fact the off-sector could never, given its specialised requirements, serve as the chief employer of Bermudians. The hospitality industry no longer provides a realistic economic fall-back position for Bermuda: we are no more in the Tourism Industry these days than we are in the pearl-diving or onion-growing businesses And while certain local sectors of the economy - construction most notably - boomed in tandem with off-shore industry, there's going to be as much demand for new office space in the foreseeable future as there currently is for retail space.

The ongoing contraction in the local economy is reflected in the singular - and deeply disturbing - fact that Government is now the single largest employer of Bermudians. And they can only keep on being paid by either increasing taxes or increasing borrowing. Or both. Obviously, neither option is particularly attractive when an economy already in recession is poised on the verge of a Depression.

Given all of this, given the almost inevitable likelihood of a financial Armageddon, perhaps Collie Buddz has the right idea after all. - Tim Hodgson