Seventy years ago this spring, Hitler's armies conquered France in a matter of weeks. The German attack was no surprise: Britain, France and Canada had been at war with Germany since the previous September, when the Nazis invaded Poland.

But when Hitler's offensive turned to the West, his quick and total victory was a shock.

Human beings like to believe that history proceeds logically, that what took place was supposed to have happened. So the French collapse gave rise to the idea that this previously unforeseen defeat had really been inevitable all along.

But the French didn't lose because they were unprepared or were drowning in a culture of defeatism.

Going in different directions? Britain's new Conservative prime minister, David Cameron shakes hands with French President Nicolas Sarkozy in London on June 18, 2010. Just days before the G8 meeting, Cameron's government brought down an austerity budget that raised sales taxes and cut spending dramatically. Almost alone among European leaders, Sarkozy has been advocating a slower approach to stopping stimulus spending. (Ian Langsdon/Reuters)

If anything, they were overconfident, and had reason to be. Until the German offensive started, the French, with the largest army in Europe, didn't think losing was on the menu.

It seems crazy in hindsight, but at the time the French thought they had that whole Hitler business well in hand.

So did many knowledgeable observers, even including some of Hitler's generals.

Only weeks before Hitler's armies rolled into France, the French prime minister was forced from office due in large part to his failure to divert forces from the German front to an attack on the Soviet Union.

The French were sweating the small stuff because they were confident that the big stuff was already in the bag. Flash forward to Toronto 2010.

Weirdly overconfident

As the leaders of the G8 and G20 nations gather in Muskoka and Toronto, the public mood feels weirdly overconfident when it comes to the state of the world's finances.

Forget that several European countries have come to the edge of default, that unemployment is stubbornly high and that growth is depressingly low, despite the trillions of dollars of free money pumped into the global economy.

There seems to be little public sense of what a serious mess we are in.

Save for the recriminations, the financial crisis of 2008 feels all but over. Stock markets have rebounded sharply.

And while a few summit protestors will be carrying balaclavas and metal pipes, most will be armed instead with shopping lists of expensive demands.

We're acting as if the war — the war against global depression and an international banking crisis — is already won, and we're at liberty to concentrate on the things we'd rather worry about.

Such as whether Stephen Harper's maternal health plan for the Third World does or does not include abortion. Or whether the president of the United States should be spending 75 per cent of his time dealing with an oil spill, or 100 per cent.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the security perimeter, inside Toronto's version of the Berlin Wall, the economic generals won't be talking about how the war is won and how it's time to move on to something else.

On the contrary, if our political leaders were honest they'd be preparing us for the economic equivalent of what Churchill promised war-time Britain as France was falling: blood, toil, tears and sweat.

Problem No. 1

There are two opposing views on where the global economy stands and what fiscal and monetary policy should do next.

Former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan salutes the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in Washington on April 7, 2010, prior to testifying about the Fed's role in the big meltdown of 2008. (J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)

The Canadian government, along with the Germans and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, thinks that the situation is bad, that we've run up such large national debts that spending has to be reined in immediately if we're to avoid blowing a giant hole in our future.

For a good summary of the argument, read this recent article by the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan. (The man some people believe is responsible for the current mess. Ah, if only it were that simple!)

As you are reading, though, bear in mind, the Greenspan-Germany-Canada-OECD view is actually the less pessimistic outlook.

Another group of economists believes that the global economy is nowhere close to being ready for discharge from hospital.

Consumer demand, says this second school of thought, is still so fragile that abruptly removing the intravenous drip of deficit spending will plunge the world back into the global depression that was barely warded off last year.

In their view, debts and deficits are problem No. 2 because we haven't fixed problem No. 1.

The family store

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winning economist, and Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf are two of the strongest advocates of this view.

The Obama administration is to some extent in this camp, though Congress increasingly isn't.

The first course of action, the Canada-Germany one, offers long-term pain for long-term gain. So does the second approach, except that the pain starts a little later, in order to ward off what its proponents believe is the immediate threat of a far larger cataclysm.

Which view is right? They may both be. We're like a family that is spending $7,000 a month on our credit card while earning $5,000 a month running the family store.

We know we have to cut back, but if we do it right now, and buy less inventory for the store, our revenues could spiral down, perhaps even faster than our expenses.

Then again, if we don't cut back, we'll end up carrying a debt load that our income will never be able to support.

Both choices are going to be painful, and there is no consensus as to which is right. As things now stand, the world's wisest economists disagree.

Either way, the war to control the aftershocks of the financial crisis is still very much on — at least inside the wall where politicians are puzzling over fundamental problems that most of us assume have already been fixed.

Outside the wall will be the protestors armed with righteousness and multi-billion dollar shopping lists.

Turn your TV volume up as high as you please; all you will hear will be a dialogue of the deaf.