The risk of a new Great Depression is greater now than at any time in the last 20 years. One indication is the outbreak of financial panic in a wide variety of geographic and economic settings: Asia first, then South Africa, Russia and Venezuela. Brazil may be next.

Then where? The frightening lesson of the depression of the 1920s and 1930s is that the dominoes simply go on falling. In the end, nowhere is safe from contagion. It is an illusion to think that a bad crisis can easily be isolated or confined in a globalized, integrated world.

The stakes could hardly be higher. World depressions destroy political stability. In the past, deflation and depression have frequently led to a vicious circle of nationalism, xenophobia, the disintegration of states, and even war.

NARO-FOMINSK, Russia—Natalya Karpova, a supervisor at a fabric factory here on the outskirts of Moscow, heard good news a couple of weeks ago. Three carloads of concrete utility poles had arrived at the train station.

This was a matter of utmost importance to Karpova, because her factory was a year behind on its electric bill and had no cash on hand. The electric company agreed to accept utility poles instead, but how to pay for utility poles with no rubles?

Simple. First, her factory shipped fabric 200 miles to a sewing factory in Nizhny Novgorod. In exchange for the fabric, that factory sewed shirts for the security guards who work at a nearby automobile manufacturer. In exchange for the shirts, the auto factory shipped a car and truck to a concrete plant. In exchange for the vehicles, the concrete plant delivered the poles to the electric company.

Thus did the Narfomsholk fabric factory pay for the power to run its dye machines.

But only for a while. "Now they want a steam shovel," said Karpova, with a sigh.

This is how Karpova’s factory and much of Russia’s industry survives these days: barter. By some estimates, it accounts for almost three-fourths of all transactions.

At closing time, the fabric factory workers hurry past a four-story, brightly colored mosaic from the Soviet era. It depicts laborers marching down a path as Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin looks on from a balcony. "We shall build our own new world," it reads. In a wholly unexpected way.

Daily, the U.S. stock market sets records. Unemployment has not been this low since Richard Nixon stood at 70 percent approval. Inflation, says the Federal Reserve, is "eerily calm."

Yet, as the U.S. economy sails serenely at flank speed through placid seas, there are troubling blips on the radar screen of the S.S. United States that suggest there may be something to these rumors of icebergs ahead.

Consider:

-- In 1997, a banner year, personal bankruptcies hit 1.3 million, a record, and personal debt soared 7 percent. Home-mortgage debt hit a record $3.76 trillion and consumer debt a record $1.27 trillion.

-- Personal savings have fallen below 4 percent of disposable income, a post-Depression low. As never before, Americans are living on borrowed money.

-- In 1997, our trade deficit set an all-time record. We have not seen deficits like these since pre-Civil War and colonial days. When a nation runs a trade deficit, it owes the money not to itself but to foreigners. The United States is now the world's No. 1 debtor nation with a foreign debt over $1 trillion, and to finance imports, we are borrowing $3 billion to $4 billion every week.

Since 45 percent of Americans now have savings, hopes and dreams wrapped in the stock market, let us pray that those who talk of "ten thousand on the Dow!" are right, and the fellows babbling about icebergs just don't know how to enjoy life.

TOKYO -- The Asian economic trouble struck like lightning 15 months ago, collapsing the booming economies of Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea and shattering millions of lives. Poor people, who already knew little comfort, have been pushed deeper into poverty, malnutrition and disease.

But in Japan, the effects on people are different. Rather than a sudden storm, Japan's prolonged recession has been more like eight years of drizzle, which has left people depressed and feeling that the sky might never be bright again.

In this rich country, where personal savings average more than $70,000 for every man, woman and child, people are not going hungry. Children are healthy and in well-equipped schools.

But more than 100 interviews with ordinary Japanese made it clear that people are not immune to the economic trouble. Far from it. They said that they felt it directly in their shrinking paychecks and that their sense of security had been shattered by bankruptcies and unemployment, which have risen to levels not seen since World War II. After decades of believing that their government would always deliver an improving life, many said they no longer trusted it. There is a debilitating feeling that Japan's prosperous heyday is over, gone forever.

"In rural China, they don't have toilets yet, but they have the feeling that they are on the rise," said Hiroshi Aoki, 30, a translator. "In Japan, where people have the latest electronic gadgets, there is a feeling of decline."

Police notice the toll that financial problems are taking on people in the rising number of suicides; doctors see it in more depression, insomnia, excessive drinking, chain-smoking and ulcers. Bankruptcy lawyers cannot keep up with their business.

Several doctors and psychiatrists said in interviews that the official projection of more than 24,000 suicides in Japan this year vastly underestimated the soaring problem. If a person dies in a hospital more than 24 hours after the attempt, for example, suicide is often not listed as the official cause of death, they said.

At least 50,000 people will be hospitalized this year after trying to kill themselves, according to what the doctors described as conservative estimates. "It is a dramatic change from 10 years ago," said Dr. Jiro Suzuki, president of the Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology. "We have many, many suicides and many, many cases where people just disappear."

Dr. Haruyoshi Yamamoto has been practicing psychiatry for 26 years and says he's never seen so many people depressed and suicidal. He said he was seeing a spectrum of physical and psychological reactions to the hard economic times, from headaches to chest pains to an inability of some people to focus or even go to work on time.

Prime Minister Obuchi said he wanted to restore people's "peace of mind" and "remake Japan into a place people can believe in." The biggest difficulty that Mr. Obuchi and the other leaders of the country face is fear. People fear that the hard times are just beginning.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina -- The process known awkwardly as "globalization" is many things. It is the information society. It is the erosion of national sovereignty. It is footloose corporations taking investments where labor is most productive. It is the growing premium on technical skills--and the growing plight of unskilled laborers.

It is also the daily flow across borders of more than $1.5 trillion, from investors seeking to maximize profits and minimize risk and moving, at times of crisis, with all the discernment of a herd. For them, Seoul and Sao Paulo, Bangkok and Buenos Aires are one interchangeable "funny world": developing nations that threaten the annual bonus.

"What you realize with the Asian crisis," said Ken Baxter, a Brazilian banker, "is that when there's a stampede in this postmodern world, you don't have time to say, 'Hey, look, cattle, you've got it all wrong!'"

Argentina was supposed to have it all right. During the 1990s it adopted the IMF program. It won the status of "major non-NATO ally" by hitching its sails to Washington's whims in a way many Brazilians consider demeaning. It tied its currency so closely to America's that the dollar is available in bank cash machines and Argentines think nothing of buying their burgers and newspapers with dollars.

So the shock has been that much greater as globalization has shown its other face. Since the Asian crisis hit, plants have been idled, growth forecasts have been slashed and the Argentine stock market has plunged.

"The financial risks of globalization are a lot bigger than optimists imagined," said Paul Krugman, a professor of economics at MIT. "We are back to a volatile, predepression world economy of financial booms and busts quite different from the Cold War years."

A friend said to me the other day that the word "crash" is no longer part of the American vocabulary. We only know stock market "correction," and corrections have just to be waited out.

He explained that the stock market only goes up, because immense popular and political interests, as well as corporate interests, are today committed to its only going up.

It struck me, as he was speaking, that this might have been what Jay Gatsby was saying to his friends during the luxurious summer of 1929. But I am a child of the Depression.

I cannot believe that the American market can only go up. I would stick with an older American assumption, that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.