That is not to say Mr Obama may not turn out to be a good president of the USA, but he will need a lot of good advice. Two lawyers who showed themselves capable of seeking and heeding it in dire circumstances, were Geoffrey Howe and Ken Clarke. Those are the best sort of politicians, the mature ones who don't pretend to have all the answers themselves, and are humble enough, i.e. confident enough, to ask others who might. In so doing, they both left things better than they found them.

The American Presidency is uniquely fitted to do that. Being in effect an eighteenth century constitutional monarchy, it can hire whomsoever it wants to help govern. Here the PM must mostly shuffle the pack he is dealt by the parliamentary democracy, balancing considerations of personal loyalty and self preservation. A mediocre cabinet may in theory be sacked, but it must still be replaced from amongst whence it came, and there is a limit to the number of one-off peers he may create to serve him from elsewhere.

In making his appointments, will Mr Obama use his power carefully, or will he rush to impress the news-as-entertainment manufacturers?

This worked as long as there was a credit boom; the bad loans didn't look bad, much as a house built on quicksand will stand as long as there's no weight load on it. As soon as a critical tipping point was reached, though, the banks' bad and good loan packages began to look dodgy, and people shied away from them, and a situation developed where no bank trusted any other bank since they were all playing the "Good loans and bad mixed up" game previously, and now assume they're all in the same perilous position.

This is the heart of the matter: there are loan packages out there which nobody knows the trustworthiness of; nobody except the original packager (who isn't daft enough to let on) knows how much rot is present to how much solid gold. As a result, banks don't want to lend each other money since the bank they're lending money to might go bust at any point and topple them over too; for similar reasons they don't like lending to people or companies either.

This is all profoundly alarming and the only quick way out is to get rid of the bad loans in the debt investment packages to improve the overall safety of said vehicles.

Herein lies the fundamental flaw in your argument, and it is a killer. To improve loan quality, the only easy way is to foreclose on, and repossess the houses held by potential deadbeats, and to write off the losses. This needs to be done fairly brutally; it'll hurt, it'll be incredibly unpopular, but it is the only medicine that will work and end the crisis.

Subsequently the Governments need to keep their sticky fingers out of the banking system and stop meddling with things that they do not understand (a rule all Governments should aspire to, at least) and most of all, leave dangerous things to experts and make it clear that if said experts want a bail-out, it will come only by the least favourable (to the victim) method possible.

This, Mr Redwood, is what a Socialist government will absolutely not do. Socialist governments like to control things, even if they are utterly incompetent at it and haven't a clue what they're doing. Gordon Brown is doing this at present; the only way out of the current crisis is to let the housing market deflate and repossess the dodgiest mortgages forthwith to improve the creditworthiness of the banks, yet this muppet of a leader insists on trying to keep the housing market inflated and is putting obstacles in the way of repossession of houses.

So, if you're expecting economic good sense out of a Socialist, you're going to be sadly disappointed.