Lovely tie darling...

Machiavelli

has spotted an interesting wardrobe point about our esteemed Chancellor...

Has he been cashing in on the recession inspired price slashing on the High Street?

Seems so...

Poor Darling

Maybe TB is going soft in his old age but he can't help but feel sorry for Darling. It's a new low for the man banned from most pubs in the country when he can't even order a second bottle of wine in a restaurant without being public rebuked by a waiter. You have to feel sorry the guy, especially given the position he is in...

Darling's

interview

in the Guardian today shows a different side of the man trapped in his own loyalty: "For Brown to repay his friend's loyalty by sacking him would be brutal - even Shakespearean. But then, politics can be like that. Darling is one of the most experienced politicians in the country. And yet, more than once, I find myself wondering how much of a political animal he really is."

Of all the characters in this unfolding tragedy you have to wonder when Darling will reach breaking point - he has taken the fall for Gordan's mistakes in the past and he continues to take the fall now and still his boss has the audacity to brief against him. The loyal friend and ally is being stamped and trodden on and you have to wonder if he will be a

Stamper

to Gordon's Urquhart?

A Howe moment from Darling and it's curtains for Gordo...

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.