The government announced last week its loan guarantee scheme to encourage fresh lending to small and medium-sized businesses. The scheme is a little complex and will take time to be much used. Will it be enough? Or will it have the impact of an air rifle pellet, rather than the artillery barrage we now need? The credit crunch is causing severe pain and is generating unemployment and impoverishment at an alarming pace. This first step may be too small to achieve the government’s ambitious aims.

Things are bad – unprecedentedly bad – so we need to consider radical actions and actions that would have been thought lunatic a year or so ago.