The malaise that has overcome business life this summer has moved from a crisis of trust to a crisis of faith. This week’s market developments - taking the Dow Jones industrial average down by 1,000 points in 10 days and pushing the dollar back below parity with the euro - marked a potentially powerful change in sentiment.

Until last weekend, concerns about trust prevailed. They remain at the centre of the malaise. Shareholders no longer trust managers, managers and pensioners no longer trust the figures and no one trusts the authorities and legislators who have permitted such a flawed set of corporate relationships to come into existence.

Given what we have learnt from emerging and post-Communist economies about the essential role played by trust, such a crisis is serious enough in itself. Restoring trust in corporate responsibility was the theme of President George W. Bush’s speech in New York last week and he returned to the subject in Alabama on Monday.

“Government can ensure that those who breach the trust of the American people are punished,” he told his Wall Street audience. In Alabama, as the markets fell, he built his remarks around the principle that: “The American economy is constructed on confidence.”

The unenthusiastic reaction to his rhetorical efforts, in both political and market terms, stems from a sense that the president failed to rise to the occasion. But he is unlikely to satisfy such a complaint unless he can find a way of addressing the broader crisis of faith, one of pervading importance to the capitalist economy and society.

The crisis of faith with which we are most familiar is that experienced by Victorian Christians as they sought to come to terms with the lessons of Darwinian science. If the Bible’s account of creation was not literally true, what did that mean for the whole relationship between man and God and for the purpose of human life?

These were overwhelmingly serious issues, with which powerful intellects and strong characters struggled in anguish for decades. The most poignant record of this anguish comes in Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach”. For the poet, as for believing generations before, the Sea of Faith was once at full tide: “But now I only hear/Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar . . .”

To suggest a comparable crisis of faith today may seem absurd. Why should breaches of trust at big companies, and in the way financial markets have valued securities during and after the late 1990s boom, raise comparably profound doubts? How can questions about the workings of the economy compare with those about the human condition?

The comparison is, however, useful. Today’s doubts are significant because they undermine one of capitalism’s most important organising principles: the motivational link it provides between present action and future reward. It provides a stimulus to human activity that - under other ideological systems - comes from an overriding political or religious purpose.

The nature of this stimulus is simple and all-pervasive: act today, despite the cost or inconvenience, in order to gain tomorrow. Without such a relentless drum-beat of reminder, the self-organising systems of capitalism would fall silent, or require supplementing by elaborate systems of bureaucratic motivation.

It is not surprising that accounting issues first led us towards this crisis of faith. Accounting accuracy is important to the capitalist mechanism because it measures the extent to which our continuous bargain between the present and the future is being kept in practice. Doubts about accounting integrity have a chilling impact on the economic mood.

But the issue goes far wider than a few disputes about accounting standards. More broadly, financial markets play both a practical and symbolic role. Their practical one is to act as the calculating engine that tells us exactly what today’s effort or sacrifice can be expected to generate in future gains. Confusions or miscalibrations in the engine lead to distorted valuations of corporations and assets and so sap our ability to act confidently. This is a powerful argument for financial authorities to worry in future about asset price bubbles.

Even without such practical considerations, financial markets play a vital symbolic role in providing the daily background noise of economic activity. By sending the message that action today will be rewarded tomorrow, they provide a relentless stimulus to action. Weak financial markets have the contrasting effect of depressing activity.

Without the drumbeat of support, managers seeking to motivate their staff have to work harder to remind them to keep trying. And individuals have to fall back on greater reliance on their own sense of purpose. This is why the financial malaise’s impact on developed economies is so potentially damaging.

Estimating the extent to which economic activity will be affected because consumers now feel themselves poorer is a task for economists. But, for the rest of us, the threat comes from diminished faith in the implicit bargain between today and tomorrow and the loss of the constant reminder of potential gains in the future.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, chronicler of the dynamic age of modern finance, best captured the restless way in which such a system pushes individuals forward against natural human inertia. “So we beat on,” he wrote as the closing words of The Great Gatsby, “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

To lose trust would indeed be serious. But to lose faith would be to risk losing capitalism’s essential magic, the impulse forward, the push against the tide. It is appropriate, then, that Gatsby was a swindler.