Alistair Darling's debt-defying stunt

Telegraph
"The Government is desperately hoping that the Asset Protection Scheme will prove to be the silver bullet that ends the financial crisis and gets banks lending again. It is the culmination of more than a year's worth of state interventions that began with Northern Rock, gathered pace with last April's £200bn Bank of England special liquidity scheme and appeared to end with the £50bn recapitalisation programme in October, which came with £250bn of loan guarantees for good measure. Despite the £500bn scale of the bail-out, it wasn't the silver bullet. ...Sandy Chen, banks analyst at Panmure Gordon, is sceptical about such a philosophy. "You could build enough wind turbines for the whole of the UK for £325bn," he says. "Wouldn't it be better to give people free power than rescuing RBS?" Mr Chen is an advocate of hard love. Britain is over-indebted and assets overpriced, he says, and the only remedy is a nasty crash. The Government, though, takes a different view."