Keynesian economics says governments should spend their way out of trouble. The trouble is, however, that governments spend badly. State spending may take cash from the public and return it to the public through projects but there is little tangible to show for it at the end: usually it would have been better not to tax the people or borrow from them to start with.

From the people who brought us the Dome, the latest grand project to hit the rocks is the £13bn scheme to centralise NHS patient records electronically. The costs have escalated and the project is four years behind schedule and slipping further. Now Fujitsu has joined Accenture in walking out, reckoning it has nothing to gain from losing more money on the contract.

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French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain’s lorry drivers are unlikely bedfellows but they have something in common: they have both got it wrong in demanding cuts in fuel tax to compensate for rising oil prices.

The problem is that demand for fuel exceeds supply. The rising oil price is the mechanism that will bring those two into equilibrium - encouraging more production and discouraging consumption. Cutting the tax on oil and thus reducing the price to the user will merely stimulate demand and push the untaxed price higher still.

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Brands have cycles: what’s popular today may be out of favour in future. And political parties are brands.

It is easy to see why Labour was so attractive in 1997. The party that had been market leader for the previous 18 years had lost its way. Consumers wanted to try something new and they liked what they got, re-electing the party at two further general elections. Even when the government was in trouble it remained more popular than the rival brand.

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The Uruguay Round of world trade talks officially took from 1986 to 1994 but it took more than a decade for the measures to be implemented. By that standard the Doha Round is moving quickly, even though it started in 2001 and it could be another two years before there is agreement. There again, it could be a lot longer.

The talks are aimed at removing trade barriers and tariffs, but while all 152 countries in the World Trade Organisation - the successor to Gatt - pay lip service to free trade, when it comes to making concessions each expects the others to move. And, as the US has shown, some of the biggest countries can dig in their heels deepest. The main reason the talks take so long is not the talking but the long sulks and stand-offs between negotiations.

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After yesterday’s blog showing how annual statistics have hidden the rise in consumer prices over the past six months, today’s is on how the stats have hidden the fall in house prices.

The respected monthly figures from the Halifax and Nationwide each show property prices down by 1 per cent over the past year - not enough to be statistically significant and sufficiently small to allow the optimists to argue that values are not slipping at all.

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The reason the Bank of England can be so sure inflation is going to rise is because it already has. Every housewife and every purchasing manager can see with their own eyes what most economists and statisticians cannot: that prices are soaring.

The reason the professionals cannot see the obvious is because they are blinded by annual rates even though that means including data from a year ago. It is as though the weather forecasters averaged out today’s temperatures with last winter’s and thus told us it isn’t really hot.

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O dear: the government is making the same mistake with the housing market as those finance directors who launch buy-back programmes into a falling market. The weight of the buying is insufficient to push values higher and the purchasers soon realises they have overpaid.

The preview of the Queen’s Speech flagged a scheme to provide £200m for buying new homes and renting them out. The government may now be spending money like it is water, but luckily that sum is peanuts in terms of the housing market. It will probably purchase fewer than 1,000 homes – though that should be welcomed by a beleaguered house building sector.

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Alistair Darling flips his 10p coin and instead of tails, 5m people lose, it is heads, 22m win. Yet Darling emerges as a loser either way. He has dug a large hole to get himself out of a small one and he now needs to dig an even bigger one to extricate himself from the latest tax changes. And despite his largesse, he has received no glory.

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Poor UK postal services are forcing an increasing number of companies to seek alternatives to the state provider - which principally means TNT or UK Mail. They now handle more than one letter in five delivered in Britain and could easily double that, very possibly taking a majority of the mail.

The more successful the private providers become, the weaker Royal Mail will be. But this is not a classic model of splitting market share: these new rivals to the state monopoly are not only competitors of Royal Mail, they are its customers too.

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Fines of €1.7bn may be as financially insignificant to mighty Microsoft as a parking fine but the US computer software group is fighting the EU’s penalties with the determination of a motorist who knows he is right – even if he also knows that the odds are loaded in favour of the system.

Microsoft is appealing against the record €899m fine imposed in February for alleged anti-competitive practices. That was on top of €497m penalty imposed in 2004 and the €281m that followed two years later.

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