Brown's incompetence
There’s a very interesting and scary article in The Times today about how disastrous Brown and Darling’s handling of Northern Rock has been.
I particularly like how he puts in perspective how much money we’re talking about:
[W]hat else could the Treasury have done with £55 billion? Here are a few ideas: it could have rescued MG-Rover and turned it into the worlds strongest car manufacturer after Toyota. It could have acquired control of the Airbus programme and shifted its headquarters to Bristol from Toulouse. And even after these industrial subventions there would have been plenty of change from £55 billion to set up a permanent endowment fund to finance Britain’s universities, or build a new high-speed rail system covering much of Britain, or a new London airport in the Thames estuary to replace Heathrow or underwrite the entire economic risks of a new generation of nuclear power stations.