"We would welcome a good, deep bloody recession." Remember that? It's too early to gauge whether the words of Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary will come back to haunt him, but at the very least it looks as if he'll get what he wished for: he must be rubbing his hands with glee as more of his rivals go belly up.

His proclamation caused something of a furore back in February, but it feels like everyone's a bit too shell-shocked to be making similarly crass statements at the moment.

Everyone apart from me, that is. Don't get me wrong; my livelihood depends on the success of entrepreneurial ventures, so the last thing I want to hear is that mid-market firms are in trouble.

I also feel for those who've been duped into overstretching themselves on the property market, and the shopfloor city workers who have lost their jobs in recent months.

But the sight of panic stricken traders and bankers streaming out of glass offices with boxes full of their belongings won’t evoke much sympathy with most; we might be bailing out failing banks with public money, but at least a few of those involved in the greedy charade are getting their comeuppance.

Of course, the pain is going to get a lot worse for all of us sooner or later, and in any case, we’re probably all implicated. It’s those who suspected naked free market capitalism wasn’t such a great idea who are sounding really smug these days. The funny thing is, I’ve heard a few entrepreneurs privately intoning that a sizeable correction might not be such a bad thing, for reasons beyond business. And it's not just turnaround specialists, either.

The prolonged boom has produced an entire generation that has never experienced lean times. It’s easy to speculate on the business consequences of this, less so to imagine the social impact. Last week, serial entrepreneur and FT Columnist Luke Johnson wrote that companies must reinvent themselves or die in the current environment:

“When times are good and money is easy we misallocate capital. This leads to waste and an eventual reckoning. As the wheel inevitably turns and conditions deteriorate, so credit tightens, companies fail and assets are recycled. This is an irresistible sequence of events.”

If cheap and easy credit breeds laziness and an expectation of easy gratification, perhaps a ‘reckoning’ is needed as much in society as it is in the economy. Maybe it won’t be such a bad thing if we all have to adopt the resourcefulness and prudence that comes naturally to most entrepreneurs.

While I’m thinking about entrepreneurs raising anti-establishment sentiments, it was interesting to see Elon Mask, one of the founders of PayPal, backing the first private venture to successfully blast a rocket into Earth's orbit.

Falcon 1, a liquid fuel rocket built by Mask’s firm, SpaceX, took off from a remote island in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday and entered orbit carrying a dummy payload.

It doesn’t get much more establishment than the space program, but not even that is out of reach of the entrepreneur now. The company is seeking to usher in an era of low-cost space flight and is developing a variety of launch vehicles to deliver satellites into orbit, but also cargo and crew to the International Space Station. However bad it gets, there’s always someone thinking big.