Tough week ahead

The business pages today don’t make for cheery reading. The Sunday Times reports that banks fear that the next week, when £57 billion worth of commercial paper needs to be refinanced, could bring the worst crisis in the money markets for 20 years.  

The Bank of England is coming in for a fair amount of stick for waiting until last week to inject extra liquidity into the system. But some of this criticism needs to be discounted as special pleading from those who think that the Bank’s job is to bail them out of trouble rather than looking after the interests of the economy as a whole.