A six-month Vat holiday for small firms, nevermind a cut in National Insurance, is not the antidote to recession. It will be impossible to recover the deferred tax.
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Peter Mandelson has a reputation as a strategist and a schemer. We should be pleased the Department of Business has a man with such talents in charge.
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The banks got into trouble with 100 per cent mortgages, so why does the government see such loans as the solution? Lenders can’t take an equity stake in homes that have no equity.
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Pawnbroking is booming despite interest rates of 8 per cent – a month. A sign of recession and a haven for the feckless you may say – but think of it as banking and it makes more sense.
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The Competition Commission has moved into new startling territory in ordering BAA to split up its airport business. Until now it has blocked expansion: now it is telling established businesses to shrink.
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It was only in June 2008 that the governor of the Bank of England had to write his grovelling letter to the chancellor explaining why UK inflation was above 3 per cent when the target is 2 per cent. But inflation is galloping ahead so quickly that July’s figure will already be over 4 per cent  - and it is heading quickly towards 5 per cent.
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Some 74 per cent of the British people think we are set for a serious and prolonged economic downturn according to a poll. Some 61 per cent think it likely someone they know will lose their job within the next year.

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With public finances collapsing, the chancellor may think this the last time to give away money. But it is because tax revenues are falling that he can afford to waive the taxes he is not receiving anyway.

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Once companies gave money to the Conservative party as freely as trade unions funded Labour. But whereas workers could opt out of their political donation, investors’ only choice was to vote out the motion at the annual meeting or to sell out of the shares.

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Alistair Darling has been forced to scrap his proposals of taxing foreign profits but the problem has not gone away. The probability now is that the chancellor is so dizzy from performing U-turns he chooses to sit back and do nothing.

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