Do people who drive cars until they’re nine years old really replace their clapped-out bangers with brand new vehicles?  That’s the theory of those advocating £2,000 grants to scrap old cars.
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The latest budget from Europe’s only other English-speaking country should be studied by Alistair Darling before he delivers his own April statement. The Irish economic measures are the opposite of what the UK chancellor is planning.
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It was the housing market that led us into this financial mess. Is it ready to lead us out?
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How will we justify to the next generation the money poured in to rescuing the financial system? Compare it with World War Two: the cost was high but the alternative unimaginable.
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The media is busily commemorating the 1984 miners’ strike that broke the stranglehold of unionized labour. In 25 years time will we be looking back to today as the end of capitalism?
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Britain’s banks have raised more than £100bn of new equity in the past year – yet their combined stockmarket worth is less than £100bn. They’ve destroyed all the value they had, plus much of the money meant to save them.

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The industrial dispute over employing Italian workers at Total’s Lincolnshire oil refinery has already provoked sympathy strikes among other trade unionists. The worry should be that it will be a catalyst for a new bout of violence on the streets.
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Japan’s Nikkei stockmarket benchmark finished January six points lower, at 7,994, than the Dow Jones index of US share prices. Is it just numbers of it this inversion telling us something?
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£500bn state support here, $825bn there; pretty soon we’ll be talking about serious money. But if we’re going to be paying for these government aid packages for more than 20 years, might not it best to go bust and start again?
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Now that recession is here, should Britain regret letting foreigners buy so much of its industrial heritage in the boom years of this decade?
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