Quotation for Today, Monday 6 April

The numbers are so big and the issues so technical, that carping requires advanced skills. Fortunately, Chris Giles of the Financial Times has the qualifications to take Brown’s Potemkin village to pieces.

On Friday Giles dismantled the $1.1trn edifice as if it were a stage prop. One quarter of it, $250bn, is described as “trade finance”, but Giles said that this is “an aspiration for the amount of trade that will be financed over the next two years” – the amount of credit that will actually be extended is no more than one-60th of that. One half of the £1.1trn is “a generalised pledge for a new financing scheme”, which includes $200bn pledged to the IMF by Japan and the European Union in recent months. No new money was formally pledged last week, although Brown claimed that China had promised $40bn. And the final quarter consists of IMF Special Drawing Rights, which the Plain English Campaign would call “printing money”.

Really, you would have thought that Brown would have learnt. His early reputation as Chancellor of the Exchequer, when he was a brilliant and prudent guardian of the nation’s finances, was terribly damaged by his attempt to count planned spending on schools and hospitals twice, and to roll up consecutive years’ numbers into impressively large “bullions”, as he called them.

John Rentoul writing in The Independent on that much trumpeted Gordon Brown Trillion dollars

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