This is Money Blog

The Gods That Failed: How Blind Faith in Markets Has Cost Us Our Future

One year ago this month, I penned a few words for thisismoney under the highly misleading heading How to get your book published.

Anyone expecting a handy guide to the ins and outs of publishing houses, literary agents, copyright law and the sort of book-jacket designer likely to give your offering that extra oomph on the shelf at Waterstone's would have been disappointed.

My 'advice' ran to four one-syllable words: get a move on.

But I did at least know what I was talking about, in terms of foot-dragging. Back in May 1998, I wrote, I, along with Larry Elliott - then, as now, economics editor of The Guardian, had written a critique of the market economy entitled The Age of Insecurity.
It had sold reasonably well, and we had great fun promoting it. There was even, improbably, a Chinese edition.

A couple of years rolled by and we decided to favour what we assumed would be a hungry public and a grateful publishing industry with a new book. Nothing much happened for a while, other than 'planning' lunches and drinks, but keeping your fans short of 'product' had worked pretty well for operators as diverse as Philip Larkin and Led Zeppelin in terms of stoking up demand. There was just one problem. It did not work for us.

Happily, in 2006, we hit on the idea of a book about the economic legacy of Tony Blair, who had sportingly announced his departure in advance. We called it Fantasy Island and it was published by Constable in May 2007.

I signed off the above mentioned misleadingly-entitled piece of last year as follows:
'Will there be a book three?
'Certainly.
'Will we get our skates on this time?
'Absolutely.
'Well, put it this way, we are having lunch in a few days' time.'

Actually, it was a dinner, in Washington, at our favourite restaurant in that city. We had two ideas for a follow up to Fantasy Island. The first was a sort of Fantasy World book, covering the huge bubble of credit that had been puffed up by central bankers. Given these were pretty well pre-credit crunch days, the idea seemed less obvious then that it does now.

The second was a book provisionally entitled The New Olympians, all about how the elites of the City and Wall Street, in cahoots with central bankers and policymakers, had been given free rein to run the world economy and, we argued, bring it to the brink of disaster.

A publisher was interested in signing us up for a new book and had quite liked both ideas. To which Larry replied that if we put both ideas together, the publisher may really like it.
Usually, this sort of 'two aspirin good, four aspirin better' thinking can get you into trouble. The sum is less than its parts.

But this time round, it worked a treat. Our new book, The Gods that Failed, was published by Bodley Head on June 5, and argues that the New Olympians are responsible for the global money bubble that is now deflating with the consequences everyone can see.

So...will there be a book four? Not for a while. This winter we are taking off - as are our wives and children, who would quite rightly not put with another six months of going for long walks at the weekends 'to let daddy get on with his work'.

But the point is this. Last year's piece may have had a misleading title, but we did take our own advice. We did get on with it. No slacking for us.

That said, the best bit about Larry's brainwave was that we were still at the aperitif stage. That meant we could enjoy our dinner without having to worry about our book.

- Dan Atkinson, Economics Editor, Mail on Sunday

TiM special offer: Buy The Gods that Failed at a 35% discount for £8.44 (RRP: £12.99)

Our man in Washington: The city with two halves

John Kennedy declared Washington to be a city of northern charm and southern efficiency.

In other words it managed to combine the worst aspects of the two halves of the American character.
With all due respect to the late president, I have long thought he was quite wrong. Washingtonians as a rule demonstrate a gentle, old-fashioned politeness quite at odds with the British view of Americans as wildly insincere people spraying injunctions to 'have a nice day' round the place in a meaningless fashion.

As for efficiency, the bartenders and waiting staff are among the best in the world, shop staff are more variable but generally good and the smaller hotels have an edge over the larger ones in terms of personnel - those working in the big places are jolly smart in their blazers and badges, and frightfully polite, but they tend to look a little terrified when you actually ask for something.
Cabbies drive large cars quite slowly and quite badly. But so does everyone else in Washington. In other words, I have long thought that the charm and the efficiency in the American capital were pretty much in the right proportions.

Until the evening of Friday October 19, since which time I have started to wonder whether the Kennedy view may not have something going for it.

To set the scene, the city was under assault from a near-tropical rainstorm that drenched everything in sight while leaving unchanged the suffocating temperature and humidity. Any Americans still doubtful about global warming ought to have been in Washington on that evening.

I was due to have dinner in the Georgetown district before returning to the city centre to join fellow journalists for a drink with Alistair Darling and his team (both he and the press were here for the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund). The distance from the centre to Georgetown was a matter of perhaps half a mile, with a similar short taxi journey back to the venue for the Chancellor's get-together.

After about 15 minutes in which our taxi sat in gridlocked traffic, my three companions and I got out and walked. The cause of the blockage became apparent at the point at which M Street enters Georgetown - the police had closed the road.
Huge numbers of officers lined the roads, rode motor bikes on the pavement, shouted at members of the public and sat in vehicles at intersections. Apparently, anti-capitalist demonstrators had taken to the streets of Georgetown and it had all turned a little ugly, although, on the scale of protests over the years against the IMF and similar bodies, this was not a major disturbance.

Late and sticky, we fell through the door of our dinner venue, a renowned steak restaurant and one of my favourite eateries - let's call it Scott's. Here, away from the chaos outside, we could surely relax in civilised surroundings and let the superb Scott's staff spoil us rotten?

True, there was a mix-up relating to the booking, but that was our fault, not theirs, and we were happy to have a drink at the bar while waiting for a table.
True, the barmaid seemed more interested in keying details of the drinks we had ordered into a very complex looking till than in actually serving the drinks.
And true, when we inquired as to why the glasses on the bar remained resolutely empty, she replied that the drink we had ordered was 'in a different location'.

One of our party, Mr William Keegan of The Observer, quipped that what Scott's clearly needed was a side bar at which one could have a drink while waiting to have a drink at The Bar.

The wait for the table was interminable, despite constant reassurances that we would be seated very shortly. Furthermore, the police barrier made it impossible to get back to the Chancellor's get-together, thus apologies had to be sent by text through the stifling night air.

In a daze, we were finally led to our seats. And at this point, a marvellous waitress took over, cared for us, even found the name of a pub likely to be showing the next day's England-South Africa match in a city almost entirely averse to rugby, and generally restored my faith in Washington as a city of both charm and efficiency.

But here is a funny thing. As I slipped back into the embrace of the Washington I know and love, I could not help finding something vaguely comforting and familiar about the ghastly events of earlier in the evening.
The traffic jam, the noisy and over-bearing police, the hopeless bar service, the dreadful sense of nothing working properly.

Ah, yes - it was just like being at home.

- Dan Atkinson, Economics Editor, Mail on Sunday

How to get your book published (from the author of Fantasy Island)

Published writers are full of advice for people wanting to get their first book into print.
Here is some succinct advice for those wishing to do the same thing with their second book - get a move on.

Unless you are modelling your writing career on that of the late Philip Larkin, with about ten years elapsing between each slender volume, then there is no time to waste.

Any goodwill built up by your first effort will melt away like snow in the sunshine. The idea that publishers will wait indefinitely for you to get your act together is sadly illusory.

The industry has a short memory, unsurprisingly given the sheer volume of books being churned out. A brain surgeon who stops practising is still a brain surgeon. Ditto solicitors, accountants and philosophers. Stop writing, and you are not a writer.

Ten years ago, Larry Elliott (then, as now, economics editor of The Guardian) and I teamed up to write The Age of Insecurity, which was duly published in May 1998. It sold moderately well and was reviewed far and wide, mostly favourably. Indeed, given it was a critique of the free-market economy, it attracted some unlikely (but welcome) friends: John Redwood MP and The Wall Street Journal Europe.

During the rest of that year and early into 1999, Larry and I had great fun promoting the book at various events, culminating in a very jolly trip to Brussels as guests of the Tribune group of Labour MEPs. A serious dinner-debate was followed by a night of quite remarkable over-indulgence by the authors.

The Age of Insecurity went into paperback and was, improbably, translated into Chinese. We talked of writing a new book, as the old decade became the new one, naturally, but there was no hurry. Furthermore, we had other things on our minds.

Larry became a member of the trust that owns The Guardian, and was serving as a magistrate in his native Hertfordshire. I changed jobs in 2000, moving to my present post on The Mail on Sunday. My wife was pregnant with our third child, who was born in March 2001. And so on...

Not until late 2001 onwards did we seriously start trying to get a second book published, and even then we had an unfortunate habit of arranging working lunches and drinks meetings that tended to be big on lunching and drinking and not so big on working. Not, surely, that there was anything to worry about? I remember one Christmas Eve, walking with my family in the village in which we then lived to do some last-minute shopping, popping a proposal into the letter box at the Post Office, pleased that I could now relax and enjoy Christmas but also confident that wheels would soon start turning. They did not.

To be fair to the unenthusiastic representatives of the publishing industry who turned us away, I am not sure any of our proposals were especially strong. But to be fair to us, the above-mentioned representatives did seem to have a habit of asking for proposals to be re-written in such a away that they would eventually decide they did not like them.

By the middle of the decade, for example, we suggested a book exposing the huge credit bubble puffed up round the world by central bankers, led by Alan Greenspan at the US Federal Reserve Board. We envisaged a punchy book with a pithy title: The Party's Over.

The industry had other ideas, asking for the temperature to be lowered, for more thoughtful reflections on the growth of China and India, for a more discursive tone. We complied, and they decided they didn't like it. I do not blame them. I didn't like it either.

Finally, we ceased our search for spurious international gravitas. Fantasy Island would be a book about Britain and about the extraordinary legacy of the soon-to-depart Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

The proposal was thrown together at top speed and put to publisher Constable & Robinson in early September, just before we both headed off to the International Monetary Fund annual meeting in Singapore. Presumably, we should have devoted our spare time out east to refining our ideas for the book; my only memory of a serious conversation involves the two of us in a bar at Changi Airport, arguing about which were the ten best albums from the Seventies.

Anyway, an offer came through, the book was written and duly published in May.

Will there be a book three?
Certainly.

Will we get our skates on this time?
Absolutely.

Well, put it this way, we are having lunch in a few days' time.

- Dan Atkinson, Economics Editor, Mail on Sunday

Taken for a (free) ride

Let no-one tell you public transport is on the way out, caught in the nutcracker jaws of Government parsimony and the irresistible rise of the car.

A few days back, the number of buses available in the West Sussex market town in which I live doubled, at the very least. Possibly the increase was even larger. Better still, the fare level on the new buses was precisely zero.

True, the extra vehicles were on the street for one day only. Furthermore, they were driven and conducted by volunteers, bus preservation society members. And yet . . . so what? A bus is a bus, and as my wife noted, these 'preserved' vehicles were, for the most part, indistinguishable from those that ferried us round as children and teenagers in the Seventies. Possibly, they were the same machines.

Quite what the two commercial operators that run services out of our town made of it is hard to say. True, some of the free rides simply took passengers round a housing estate and back to the town centre. But one journey ran all the way to Godstone in Surrey and back again, the sort of trip for which the 'real' bus companies are presumably used to extracting coin of the realm from their customers.

It is 18 years since Graham Coster addressed the question of whether 'preserved' railways are actually railways or merely extravagant hobbies in his novel Train, Train ((Bloomsbury). If a bus or railway preservation society publishes a timetable and runs scheduled services, albeit for the enjoyment of its members, there is presumably nothing to stop the schoolchild or commuter from making use of those services, provided they go to the right destinations.

And if they do so, and - more importantly - come to rely on them, surely those services have become as 'real' as those operated by Transport for London or First Capital Connect? True, they are likely to be hopelessly uneconomic and subsidised by the free labour of enthusiasts. But plenty of public transport services are kept going by public subsidy, rather than solely by money taken in fares. What is the big difference?

Ultimately, we are sniffy with (in particular) preserved railways because many, perhaps most, are devoted not so much to the continuation of a particular line, but to the continuation of a particular form of locomotion - steam. The line is merely a means to this end.

Some years ago, my family and I were visiting a station on a preserved railway line. On the same day, the station was also visited by members of a Second World War society, resplendent in RAF uniforms and other period gear. Presumably, they were attracted by the prospect of striking poses next to steam engines of roughly the right period.

At the ticket barrier, one member - dressed as an Army officer - fell into an argument with a member of station staff as to whether his status allowed him on to the platform without paying. In other words, an Army officer (who was not one) debated with a ticket collector (who was not one) as to the privileges of his rank (which he did not possess).

This little incident doubtless tells us a lot about the way we live today.

Precisely what that may be, I have no idea.

- Dan Atkinson, Economics Editor, Mail on Sunday

Washington blog: The wet and dry economies

Dan Atkinson at the G7 in Washington...

Another five-day circus is over, and the 'moving map' on the seat-back video screen puts your British Airways airliner somewhere over Newfoundland, heading home.

The world is safe for another six months - or, at the very least, the institutions charged with guarding the world's economy have completed another hectic round of back-slapping, drinks parties and statement-making.

Twice a year, usually in Washington, once in the Spring and once in the Autumn, finance ministers and central bankers gather for a marathon sprint of economic diplomacy, with a key challenge for them (and we in the press) being to keep track of whether they are meeting at any one time as the Group of Seven rich industrial nations, the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank.

They sprinted again over the past few days.

Broadly speaking, Friday is the G7, Saturday is the IMF and Sunday is the World Bank. But it is obviously not quite that simple.

For Sunday newspapers journalists, by contrast, one day is starkly different from all the others, in the most pleasant way imaginable.
Sunday, of course.

While our daily colleagues, who took Saturday off, return to the grindstone, working for their Monday editions, we can take in the special atmosphere of Sunday in Washington, a day for visiting bookshops, reading heavy newspapers and literary reviews and arranging a civilised lunch, all in the sunshine of late Spring or early Autumn.

It is all vaguely reminiscent of an older Washington, in which bookishness mixes in a high-minded way with good food and drink, a Washington of Georgetown hostesses and martinis in the N Street drawing rooms of Senator's town houses, during which one is always running into men with floppy bow ties who all used to work for the late President Kennedy, to whom they refer as 'dear Jack'.

As I was imagining a day of such balmy elegance on Sunday, imagine my reaction to the weather warning on the radio, relating to heavy rainfall throughout DC, northern Virginia and suburban Maryland.

And indeed, the rain pounded down for most of the day, the sort of rain that treats a standard telescopic umbrella with utter contempt and manages to soak the bearer.

Back home, my wife kindly told me, the sun shone out of a blue sky.Which hardly struck me as fair, given that Washington is roughly parallel with the middle bit of Turkey whereas London is roughly parallel with the east coast of Canada.

An interesting way of looking at the world, when you come to think about it, and capable of indefinite extension to all major cities. Perhaps, I thought, as the aeroplane touched down at Heathrow, it is rather more imaginative than the IMF's division into emerging markets, developing countries and so on.

Rainy or non-rainy? Wet or dry?

The economic map may never look the same again.

- Dan Atkinson, Economics Editor, Mail on Sunday

News links...

• Comment: A positive vibration from the IMF
• Comment: Dislikeable Wolfowitz must go, and go now
• Brown hails IMF economic efforts
• World Bank boss in row over girlfriend

Washington scandals: Wolfowitz and shock-jock Imus

Dan Atkinson at the G7 in Washington...

Many moons ago, there was a fashion across the British press for a regular column from a correspondent in the United States, the tone of which was a sort of thigh-slapping well-I-never amazement at the latest eccentricity of our American friends.

Disposable lighters were bad enough - now they have disposable cameras! Some people have a television set - in the bedroom! As for the phenomenon of 'streaking'...well, I never.
Times changed and this sort of thing became old hat.

These last few days, however, I have been wondering whether a revival is due. Two scandals have had Washington abuzz in the last few days. One has directly involved the events that brought me here, the meetings of the Group of Seven rich nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The other is about as far removed as can be imagined from the sphere of conference rooms, press conferences and official Lincoln limousines.

In the first case, World Bank presi dent Paul Wolfowitz was at the centre of accusations that he helped his girlfriend to enjoy a huge salary, paid for by the bank, on her transfer to the State Department (America's version of the Foreign Office). Mr Wolfowitz has made the battle for good governance in developing countries a key theme at the bank, which is the world's leading development institution. His conduct is being scrutinised by the bank, a process he fully accepts.

The second case involves someone of whom you have probably never heard, the broadcaster Don Imus. He was disgustingly rude on air about a women's basketball team, thus was sacked by radio and television group CBS.

All is as it should be, surely? The person against whom allegations have been made is still in his job while the allegations are looked into; the person who is bang to rights has lost his job.

In fact, all is not as it seems. For a start, Mr Imus was sacked only after the public row over his comments refused to die down. CBS's later claim that the dismissal was part of some strategy to root out a culture of demeaning speech looks like so much flannel.

Then there is fact that Mr Wolfowitz has already apologised for what he described as a mistake in relation to an aspect of the 'girlfriend's salary' affair, suggesting the inquiry can never clear him entirely.

Furthermore, Mr Imus was employed as a 'shock jock', someone whose role in life was to offend. As we have seen, Mr Wolfowitz's job was to help clean up the governance of developing countries.

So the shock jock who said something shocking has been sacked, whereas the good-governance man who seems to have fallen short of best practice in terms of good governance is still employed.

It would be tempting to see this, through British eyes, as a class issue, and there is something in that. Mr Wolfowitz, the dark-suited Washington professional, cleaves to traditional standards of minimal explanation and apology at times of trouble, and goes in for nothing much by way of wearing his heart in his sleeve.

His girlfriend Shaha Riza, a British subject with a Middle Eastern background, is of much the same restrained demeanour.

Contrast that with both sides in the Imus affair. The basketball team's coach announced the comments had constituted 'an experience that we will never forget,' adding for good measure: 'These comments are indicative of greater ills in our culture.'

Possibly, or they may simply be indicative of the stupidity and ignorance of Mr Imus. She concluded in the most overblown way imaginable: 'Let us continue to work hard together to make this world a better place.' Who is 'us' and when did this hard work, which we are to continue, actually begin?

That said, all this was positively buttoned-up compared to the behaviour of Mr Imus himself. His self-abasement knew no bounds as the fearless shock jock wheedled to all and sundry.
At one point he declared: 'I'm not a bad person. I'm a good person who said something bad.'

And he had changed. Oh yes. 'Here's what I've learned: that you can't make fun of everybody, because some people don't deserve it.'

Very profound.

On a radio programme hosted by the Reverend Al Sharpton, a leading black civil rights leader demanding his dismissal, Mr Imus even referred to his own remarks as 'repugnant' and 'repulsive'. He said: 'Our agenda is to try to be funny and sometimes we go too far, and sometimes we go way too far.'

With this abject performance from the Great Offender, the Reverend Sharpton and the rest of Mr Imus's attackers must have known there was blood in the water, and so it proved.

And, yes, this does look like a class divide. Self-control and steadiness under fire may well be hallmarks of America's power elite, whereas emotional incontinence and the promiscuous distribution of apologies identifies a certain strata in society without influence, without much money and without much in the way of education.

More cheeringly, I like to think the reason that Mr Imus was sacked and Mr Wolfowitz hung on is that, deep down, most Americans of all classes know that shock-jocking is a largely worthless activity, whereas running the World Bank is not.

That said, someone in a post calling for sensitive diplomacy kept his apology short and curt, whereas someone supposed to tear into society's sensibilities and not give a hoot about the consequences could hardly stop himself from saying sorry.

Well I never.

- Dan Atkinson, Economics Editor, Mail on Sunday

News links...

• Comment: A positive vibration from the IMF
• Comment: Dislikeable Wolfowitz must go, and go now
• Brown hails IMF economic efforts
• World Bank boss in row over girlfriend

IMF blog: Our man in Washington

You may know the scene from old, flickering newsreel footage shot any time from the mid-Forties to the early Sixties.

Under the Queen's watchful gaze, the Union Jack runs down the flagpole. Another flag is run up. An independent nation is born. The British go home.

All this, of course, was long before our current Prime Minister decided that running the flag up again in assorted inhospitable places was a good idea, but that is another story.

More to the point, this week sees our (presumed) next Prime Minister clear the way for an old-fashioned withdrawal from a piece of territory the British have occupied since 1999.

I refer, of course, to the chairmanship of the ministerial committee of the International Monetary Fund, whose Spring meeting is under way in Washington. The Chancellor could probably go on indefinitely, but not if he lacks the one qualification for the job - being a finance minister.

Funnily enough, as Washington prepared for the last hurrah of the Brown years, I was stricken with a bad case of dental trouble. It was a scene out of Graham Greene - insignificant British man on the edge of great events preoccupied with his own problems.

But the premises in which I was treated had little in common with the seediness of Greeneland. Surrounded by gleaming equipment, I was placed in the hands of a dentist who looked about 17, his eyes shining with the idealism of youth.

After treatment, I was presented with a bill the numbers of which would have been comprehensible only to astrophysicists. For the same money in Blighty, you could have had open-heart surgery with enough left over to celebrate at the Cafe Royal.

Still, the labourer is worthy of his hire, although the episode put a brighter gloss on the Chancellor's NHS spending binge.

True, it has not produced much in the way of NHS dentists, but it is the thought that counts.

Meanwhile, Britain's days in the IMF ministers' chair seem numbered. Could Brown's successor seamlessly take over, turning the position into a sort of Head of the Commonwealth role that is assumed to go to a Brit?

Perhaps. But don't bet on it.

- Dan Atkinson in Washington, Economics Editor, Financial Mail on Sunday

IMF news...

• IMF warns over £58bn UK black hole (12 April 2007)
• IMF see big private-equity hangover (11 April 2007)
• Property could slump, warns IMF (6 March 2007)
• Google News: 'IMF'

Washington blog: Day One at the IMF

Technology strides on. When first I came out here, back in the dark ages of 2002, I was solemnly entrusted with Financial Mail's one and only mobile phone capable of operating in the United States.

To get it to work, one had to change the frequency on arrival at Dulles Airport.

Now my British machine hooks up on American networks without a hitch and it is even claimed that the 0044 code is unnecessary when calling home, although I have yet to find this theory works particularly well under battle conditions.

Digital cameras snap arrivals as they leave their flights, clever machines take fingerprints and other clever devices sample one's signature. It is rather like one of those March of Progress newsreels vaguely reminiscent of Citizen Kane and full of the wonders of modern science.

Yet the triumph of technology is a little patchy, to say the least. For example, plugs in the United States are so flimsy as to be apparently constructed from silver paper. Not that this matters much because house current is so low it is hard to get the above-mentioned British mobile phones to charge.

Then there is the shower in my hotel room, a device of such feebleness as to produce a weedier jet of water than even the dodgy changing-room showers I remember from school in the Seventies.

Taxis manage to be simultaneously huge and yet cramped, possibly because of the drivers' habit of filling at least the passenger seat with personal possessions, taxi meter, bottle of water and so forth.

In all, then, the marvels of progress are spread around somewhat unevenly. Not to worry, however. The British press corps is in town for meetings of the Group of Seven rich countries, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Gordon Brown is flying in for what is expected to be his last appearance.

Here is a chap who can get things done. After chairing the IMF ministers' committee for all these years, fixing showers and plugs should be a doddle.

- Dan Atkinson in Washington, Economics Editor, Financial Mail on Sunday

IMF news...

• IMF warns over £58bn UK black hole (12 April 2007)
• IMF see big private-equity hangover (11 April 2007)
• Property could slump, warns IMF (6 March 2007)
• Google News: 'IMF'

The Easter hunt: house prices madness

Just a few days to go, and the great pursuit can start afresh.

Family cars will criss-cross the country, unsatisfactory lunches will be picked at by complaining children in pub gardens and sheaves of photocopied paper will pile up on the dashboard.

Easter is almost upon us and with it the hunting season. Househunting, that is.

Vast swathes of free time, mostly at weekends, will be consumed in trailing round other people's homes. Societies saner than ours (there must surely be some) would greet the early days of Spring by doing almost anything else, whether going for walks, digging the garden, attending sports events or taking up a new hobby.

The British (particularly the English) prefer, in large numbers, to take to the road in search of alternative accommodation.

I suspect a fair amount of househunting is not only fruitless but is suspected to be so by those carrying it out. As April arrived, Chaucer's pilgrims set out for Canterbury. In our materialist age, families take to the highways and byways in search of a secular fulfilment that is unlikely to be achieved - a wonderful home at an affordable price.

Said home is just beyond the horizon, which is why every other househunter has missed it. As Philip Larkin put it in his wonderful poem Here, it is 'out of reach'. Largely a fantasy, its pursuit does little harm.

The same cannot be said, however, for that branch of househunting that actually results in the transfer of residential property. Put bluntly, Britain is experiencing a rather sickly housing boom at the moment, one fuelled with vast amounts of credit.

In February 2006, outstanding mortgage debt stood at £981.8bn. By February this year, the figure was £1,097bn - yes sir, more than one trillion pounds, a rise of 11.7%.

For the record, outstanding consumer credit expanded by a more modest amount, from £192.6 to £212.8 - a rise of 10.5%.

And the earnings of the people running up these debts? Average earnings between January 2006 and January 2007, the latest available figures, rose 3.6%.

Unsurprisingly, house price inflation is bucketing ahead, at 9.3% in the year to March, according to the Nationwide, against overall inflation of 4.6% in the year to February, as measured by the Retail Prices Index.

This is a form of madness, and some of us have to take a stand. This Easter, and beyond, provided you live in a reasonable home in a peaceful neighbourhood, do anything other than go househunting. Go to the seaside, the races, your nearest National Trust property (pictured), the museum, the pub - all are preferable.

And should you live in the above-mentioned all-right home, and yet be tempted to join in the hunting season, here is a little thought experiment.

Cast your mind back no more than a few short months to the evening of the final working day before Christmas 2006. The last cards are posted, the last presents bought. Upstairs, the children (if applicable) are in bed, although probably not asleep. A CD of Christmas music is playing in the kitchen, where two glasses of wine and a plate of nibbles stand ready. The breadwinner has finally negotiated their way home via a public transport system that is already shutting down for the big break.

Now, what was your next move? Did you riffle through the property pages of the local newspaper for possible viewings? Did you log on to the internet with the same thought in mind? Were you peeved that you would probably have to wait until the day after Boxing Day at the earliest to get hold of even a junior staff member at an estate agent?

Or did such pottiness not occur to you as you clinked glasses with your other half and prepared to enjoy the festive season? If so, just remember - it is the same house now as it was then.

And if you still need an outlet for your energies as the trees burst into life and the sap rises, there is an even more venerable property-related activity that falls due at this time of year.

It is called Spring cleaning.

- Dan Atkinson, Economics Editor, Financial Mail on Sunday

>> Latest news on house prices

Windows, monorails and cheap TVs - Gordon's legacy

Randolph Churchill, when Chancellor, jotted his Budgets down on Carlton Club writing paper.
Had his efforts compared in size and length to those of Gordon Brown, each Budget from Churchill Senior would have consumed a whole year's supply.

This is the week the long-running Brown show started to wind down. Even grudging admirers have to admit that it has been a good show while it lasted. In the manner of Bruce Forsyth, energy, determination and relentless optimism work wonders in making up for any artistic shortcomings.

That said, the act is starting to look a little tired. Too many of the themes have not changed in a decade. There is too little new material. Even the title - Building Britain's long-term future: Prosperity and fairness for families - sounds vaguely like the titles of all the other Budgets, Pre-Budget Reports and Spending Reviews.

There are more than 300 pages, but the new announcements (helpfully printed in red ink) account for a sliver of the whole thing. The rest is a great long wrap-up of what has gone before. If TS Eliot believed that every poem, in some sense, ought to contain all the other poems, so the Chancellor seems to think that every Budget should encompass every other Budget.

But then, that is unsurprising, given how much of a Brown Budget seems to be taking place in a sort of permanent very-near-future tense.

Thus public services are always just about to be ‘delivered’, we are apparently ‘building’ a fairer society but have not quite got there yet, the productivity ‘challenge’ (which is one way of describing our sluggish productivity performance) is something we are ‘meeting’ and assorted problems are always being ‘tackled’.

Not that you should run away with the idea that the Chancellor talks in waffly, broad-brush terms and eschews detail. Far from it.

Turn to page 183, for example, for this gem of micro-management: ‘The Government…welcomes the introduction of the British Fenestration Council’s window energy rating system…and will work with the industry and manufacturers to explore the case and scope for incentives to encourage the installation of energy efficient glazing.’

That’s windows taken care of, then.

On page 161, a table lists ‘public investment in the UK science base’, and solemnly records the percentage of gross domestic product accounted for by such spending in the four years from 2007-2008 to 2010-2011. In every case, the figure is 0.39 per cent, presumably a tribute to the ‘stability’ of which the Chancellor is so fond.

On page 189, the Government announces an exemption from the aggregates levy for aggregate ‘arising from the construction and maintenance of railways, tramways and monorails.’ Monorails! What monorails? Outside the odd airport and in old episodes of Thunderbirds, have you ever seen a monorail?

In his quieter moments, Brown must know that his ten-year Treasury stint will be fondly remembered, as was that period in the late Fifties and early Sixties that peaked with Harold Macmillan’s ‘candy floss summer’ of 1959.

With cheap flights, flat-screen television sets, barbecues and the rest, we have all been quite happy, in an easy-going, materialistic sort of way.  For the Chancellor, however, presiding over a consumer boom was never quite enough.

Dan Atkinson, Financial Mail on Sunday