By Fiona Chan

Six months have passed since investment bank Lehman Brothers ignited a firecracker of financial turmoil that plunged economies around the world into recession.

With no clear end to the crisis in sight, the business and banking worlds are undergoing painful transformations that have left their landscapes littered with the corpses of once great but now bankrupt enterprises.

Thousands of companies have already gone to the wall and individual bankruptcies are expected to hit all-time highs in many countries this year. Banking giants have been nationalised, Iceland has gone under, and corporate and job losses are likely to keep on mounting.

But the worst may not be over yet. Even as financial devastation works its way through the system, Round Two could soon be upon us in the form of governments pushing monetary and fiscal policies to their limits, throwing caution to the wind to stem the bleeding.

As the world holds its breath, the United States is poised to unveil an ambitious, but controversial, rescue package that could mark the turning point in this crisis.

If it works, banks will be relieved of their toxic assets and confidence will return to economies, some of which are already showing signs of bottoming out. But a failure to deliver could spark a fresh bout of pessimism, panic selling and plunging growth numbers.

To borrow an overused cliche, the only certainty left is uncertainty. When the smoke clears and the dust settles on the worst recession since the Great Depression, things may never be the same again. But just how different will they be?

We asked leading economists and academics to sketch out the possible shape of the... POST-CRISIS WORLD