Granted, the discovery of a continent here, a technological invention there and an increase in efficiency somewhere else can accommodate the growth in the real economy that is required to keep pace with the growth in the virtual one, but only to a point – which is of course precisely why the economic explosion begins with the discovery and opening up of just such continents from the early 16th Century on and is reinforced with the advent of the industrial revolution. Capitalism, banking and growth become inseparable, but in a world bounded by the real, logic dictates that the virtual economy must eventually peel away from the real one and sooner or later the day of reckoning arrives - when the gulf that separates these two economies is too large to be sustained - for no power on earth can match the power of compound interest in the ether.