FROM EMILY MAITLIS
Hello,
"A banker is the kind of fellow who lends you an umbrella when it's sunny, and then begs the Government to buy it back from you when it rains..."
(Anon)
Hailed as a superhero by European journalist yesterday, the Prime Minister is being called something much less flattering by bank shareholders today who are coming to terms with the idea that they'll not receive any dividends unless tax payers get their money back first. They're complaining that the US bailout was much less cruel to investors than the Brown Darling plan.
What does this mean for the Lloyds-TSB takeover of HBOS? Will the government back down or will the city get to have its cake and eat it? We'll be talking to the Chancellor Alistair Darling and his French counterpart Christine Lagarde.
Meanwhile it seems to be a given that we've got a fierce recession coming our way, but has the threat of fiscal apocalypse receded? Seasoned economic weather forecasters are now peering nervously towards something ominously called credit default swaps. Some of our banks have trillions of pounds tied up in them.
How worried should we be? Apparently, when Lehman Brothers went to the wall, it was holding quite a few of these bad debt insurance notes, and this debt will now transmit itself throughout the lymph nodes of the banking and hedge fund system to the tune of a $365 billion dollar debt.
And if that isn't enough, the financial markets that were going up yesterday are now on the way back down again.
Liz MacKean will be continuing her tour of credit crunched Europe tonight. Today she's in the Republic of Ireland - the first country to announce it would comprehensively guarantee savers' bank accounts. Has its position within the eurozone, she asks, allowed it to embark on colourful policies it might otherwise not have got away with?
And as if to remind us that no matter how bad things seem, it's never really that bad, Mark Doyle reports from a country where journalists seldom go - Somalia. His disturbing report on the lives of UN peace keepers in the dying city of Mogadishu puts all our troubles into perspective.
Join us at 10:30 on BBC2.
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