All over public transport last week, a rarity erupted through the newspaper-reading nation: very few, for once, were drinking in the showbiz pages like their daily elixir of life, looking for the latest sight of Amy Winehouse's escalating transformation into a troll under a bridge in a very Grimm fairytale, but were head-down engrossed, for possibly the first time ever, in even the smallest print of the financial news and its bewildering foreign language.

The questions were big: were we all doomed, and was this really the new Great Depression, and should I move my lifetime's savings to "hidden under the fern in the flowerpot on the bathroom sill"? Most of us, of course, are as expert in the workings of global economics as in the workings of the Large Hadron Collider, and all we have to go on is what the experts decide to tell us. And the experts never agree. One banking expert's "we're on the brink of global catastrophe affecting everyone" has been another corporate banking expert's "all it means is one bottle of wine at lunch instead of two".

The non-banking experts, meanwhile, have been more philosophical, from the author Naomi Klein over in America musing "George Bush talks about Wall Street being drunk, but he's been serving the drinks" to Jeremy Paxman's poetic observation "unbridled capitalism is bound to reap its own nemesis", to acerbic pop minstrel Paul Heaton (sometime Housemartin and Beautiful South founder), the rare kind of pop culture personality you're more likely to see on Question Time than in a skip in a showbiz column.

"We've been living," he declared (even before this week's UK meltdown), "in the golden age of flash. It started in the mid-80s with the Thatcher government and it's really interesting to see the balloon burst. It's gonna be really good for us, now, this credit crunch. All this greed and all this witheringly growth; when Blair and Brown talked about growth, what the hell d'you want growth for? You only want growth for your vegetable patch! For your tomatoes! The way the world has gone has meant no-one cares about real things anymore "

As the defining name for an era goes, the golden age of flash will do for now as we watch, aghast, at this latest update on the bonfire of the vanities. And if the golden age of flash is finally all over it means a new era is being ushered in, surely promising a considerably less flash, more real way of life, perhaps one we'll know as the golden age of Green Flash, as in, you know, Dunlop Green Flash trainers from Woolies for £29.95 instead of Zoom Drive Sprint Max Challenge state-of-the-art Nikes like miniature bubble cars for £169. There'll be no market any more for children aged three in a swamp in Indonesia sewing sequins in the shape of dolphins on a dress costing £15 because we'll have to wear the clothes we have for more than one week, suddenly dusting off grandma's button box and declaring "make do and mend". Perhaps the obesity crisis will finally be resolved, a nation suddenly learning to cook from scratch with a thimble of lentils while planting tatties in our window boxes and "digging for victory", like the winners we were back in the good old days of, er, the second world war. There'll be no excess cash any more for boob jobs, Botox, nuclear teeth or any other non-essential trifle, so we'll finally revert to looking fairly normal, which is to say a bit of a state, as our current levels of paranoia, neuroses and physical self-loathing finally begin to abate. And we'll have to survive, of course, with just the one gigantic television the size of a garage wall, possibly in an actual garage itself, because that's where we're now living as the house was repossessed months ago following five redundancies in a single family in a week.

Arbroath, meanwhile, will become the new French Riviera as foreign holidays fade into history and £30 tartan blankets become the new 17th-century silken Persian rugs, like the one sold by Christie's at auction last June for $4.45 million. A rug, you'd imagine, Damien Hirst would approve of, the only man this week to view the financial pages and wonder how much richer he could possibly become (clue: £111m in two days).

And whatever we think of Damien Hirst, he has certainly done what art is supposed to do: define the times we live in. In the future, we'll surely look back at his Golden Calf (sold for £10.3m) and his diamond-encrusted skull (still worth £50m) knowing it doesn't get any more golden age of flash than that. "I'm totally amazed that my art is selling while banks are falling," fainted Hirst on day two of his record-breaking auction. "I guess it means that people would rather put their money into butterflies than banks. Seems like a better world today to me." His opponents, meanwhile, couldn't be more appalled, by both Hirst himself and the climate that created him.

"Sometime in the future," decided a man called Charles Thomson, co-founder of the anti-conceptual art movement The Stuckists last week, "people will be laughing their heads off at all this.

Actually, quite a lot of people are right now. One of them is Damien Hirst, on his way to the bank."