I saw Mikhail Gorbachev in the paper today - and it made me think how two words - perestroika and glasnsot (definitions from Wikipedia below) - came to symbolise the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war. I was born in 1962 and I think the events of 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down were probably the most significant event in my lifetime.

Are we at a similarly epochal point now? I suspect the talk about the death of capitalism is hugely overstated - I haven't seen any better alternatives - but there is clearly some change ahead. This appears to be the agenda for the upcoming G20 meeting - certainly from a European perspective.

How do we describe the the renewal of capitalism? What snappy title can we use? The russians managed to coin a phrase that summed up a process that changed the world. Suggestions welcome.

Perestroika is the Russian term for the political and economic reforms introduced in June 1987[1] by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Its literal meaning is "restructuring", referring to the restructuring of the Soviet economy. Glasnost was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of 1980s.