A tale of two bank collapses...

A couple of things got me thinking about Northern Rock again earlier.

• Firstly a man wearing the most ridiculously tied tie interrupted the news with the sports headlines, how does a broke bank who owe the British taxpayer countless billions find the resources to
  sponsor
  a premiership football club?

• Secondly and on a more serious note I got into a chat with the American about the initial
  reports
  that the worst of the
  credit crunch
  in the States might be over
  (?)
  , the beginning of the end so to speak. We both agreed that were these reports to be believed then Americans might just be avoiding catastrophe by the skin of their teeth. The US governments handling of the situation might just have worked.

The US and UK government's handling of the potential collapse of two serious market contenders, Northern Rock and Bear Stearns couldn't have been more different. Where supervision from the Federal Reserve in the shape of

$30 billion

, enabled JP Morgan Chase to take over Bear Sterns and put it back on the road to recovery so successfully that $1 billion of the debt was recovered within two weeks, the nationalised Rock has yet to be able to cough up a single penny of the

£91 billion

it owes you and I.