Bing Crosby* singing a song from the Great Depression seems a long way from where we are now in 2010, but to borrow a phrase, buddy can you spare £80 billion?
I know that at election time, we, the voters, are supposed to ask the difficult questions and receive the collective wisdom of our political masters, even if it bears little resemblance to the policies they then pursue once the ballots have been safely counted.
With a deficit of around £160 billion, you would imagine that the odd £80 billion would come in handy. By almost halving the deficit it would, in fact, help Chancellor Darling or Chancellor Osborne or even Chancellor Cable ( surely some mistake here) to achieve at a stroke what the present Government has said it wants to do over the next 4 years.
The reason is the timely conjunction of market need, technical capacity and tumbling costs.
The pictures at the top of the article showing a grim faced Dick Fuld, former Chief Executive, and one of the workers who lost her job that fateful day almost one year ago brought home what a momentous event the collapse of such a major investment bank actually was. The banks in the UK were deemed to be too big to fail and have been bailed out with huge amounts of taxpayers’ money but Lehman Brothers went under owing an eye watering $613 billion.