Oh I don’t know, Liz. Even I was complaining on October 4th on wowowow that we should have bought the banks rather than buying the derivatives. I don’t think Gordon Brown was the only one with his opinion. He was just in a much better position than I to do something about it. I think there were people in the U.S. that knew what to do, but these were not people in the right positions of power. I am glad Brown got everyone to see the light.

I wouldn’t be so easily impressed by him if I were you. With Gordon Brown the devil is in the detail. For so many years he has presented himself as the greatest Chancellor we have ever had (he was just very lucky to inherit a very healthy economy from the previous Tory Chancellor, Kenneth Clark) he claimed to have ended ‘Boom & Bust’ personally! Under his leadership (and he was in charge of our country’s finances for ten years) he created the environment whereby this crash was able to happen in the UK. The checks and balances he put in place, to replace what had worked very well for decades, were plainly inadequate. He has taxed us to the hilt and squandered it on increasing his own voter base by creating jobs in the public sector. If they vote against him, they will end up losing their jobs. He has caused my husband to work 5 years longer than he had planned because Gordon Brown has been taking billions (no exaggeration) annually out of the pension funds to pay for all of his daft schemes. We are as a country more in debt now as a result of his control of the UK finances than we were when he took over in 1997. He wasn’t mending the roof while the sun was shining. We had one of the best pension systems in the world until he got his hands on it. Thanks to him, we are paying more in tax for our gas than the cost of the gas itself. I don’t actually mind what we pay to the gas companies, they at least do something for their money, like find it, get it out of the ground, refine and distribute it. Our government just sits on its backside watching it roll in while we hurt far more than you Americans have, and the raise in cost really hurt you. At its worst, our gas was approximately $8 for one of your gallons, thankfully it is slowly going down. It always goes down slower than it goes up! Oh, how he is enjoying this crisis. It is the first time he has been seen smiling this much in years. Let us hope he has come up with the right solution in these drastic circumstances, but one of our political journalists thinks that the Labour Party will use public ownership of the banks to their own ends. Already they have stipulated that no jobs be lost in Scotland as a result of the HBOS (Halifax Bank of Scotland) merger with Lloyds. Who knows what more they will stick their oar into? With luck this shower will be voted out at our next General Election. Unfortunately, we can’t anticipate when this will be like you can in the US. It is on the whim of the incumbent government.