"Is Gordon Brown going mad?" an email correspondent asked me, not unkindly, this morning. "Quit while you're ahead," another one tells him. I'll come back to the PM later. But why pick on him? Banks and newspapers seem to be at least as mad in their own way today. And has the European commission done us harm?
Are the banks going mad on a day when, awash with taxpayer-funded liquidity, they are still not lending to each other or to their own customers, the businesses and citizens who need money to work?
The emerging bank strike only serves to deepen the recession now bearing down on us all. This at a time when they are trying to wriggle out of the government's bail-out terms, agreed as long ago as pre-dawn on Monday.
It smacks of trade union militants in the 70s and the fact that they protest that the parallel American deal is easier on US banks - no outright ban on dividend payments and 5% interest rates instead of 12% - should not move us. The Royal Bank of Scotland was paying out dividends of 10% when already in deep trouble.
And those newspapers, the ones that again trumpet falling prices of fuel - petrol below £1 a litre in some places - and staple foods, are they mad too? They present the dip as "Some good news at last!" (copyright Daily Beast), when behind it lurks the problem of falling demand around the world as the real economy follows the gyrating markets downhill.
If prices fall all-round for long enough we've caught the deflationary Japanese disease of the 90s. Better a dose of inflation than that, as policymakers now seem to recognise.
So the clamour for lower interest rates - 3% by the end of this year, anyone? - to kick activity back into life grows by the day. We will pay the price in higher taxes and inflation later; the alternative would be worse: a deep depression leading heaven knows where.
Meanwhile stock markets around the world took another dive yesterday, following each other naturally, because evidence from all over - including Britain's new unemployment total of 1.79 million - was that all forms of consumer demand will plummet in Europe and north America, thereby hurting the export-orientated Chinese economy in particular.
In which context Brown-ish talk in Brussels of coordinated responses and a globalised revamp of the post-1945 regulatory architecture of international finance is fine and dandy.
But national governments still call most of the crucial shots and they act under pressures - often conflicting - from domestic voters, business and banking. So yesterday's FT warned "Brown's £37bn rescue: did it go too far?" on one page and "Business warns of bail-out loopholes" (banks could pull wool over eyes) on the next.
Back to Brown. My correspondent thinks this week's favourable publicity - after a year of abuse - may have gone to his head; hence the "mad" jibe. Well, he would be only human if it did, though unwise.
Ian Traynor's dramatic description of the EU summit hero in today's Guardian stresses that he adopted a self-deprecatory tone. But the miracle was that he turned up early - or even at all - for a summit. Who can forget the Lisbon treaty signing fiasco?
As chancellor, Brown was notorious for arriving late and leaving as soon as he decently could, lecturing EU colleagues in briefings back in London, but not hanging around to schmooze or persuade in the corridors of Brussels.
So EU leaders may be grateful for his plan - provided it works, which remains uncertain until markets rally more convincingly and banks reopen for business. But they will not forget the past. And some accounts today say that Nicolas Sarkozy, the current EU president, managed to avoid all mention of the Brown plan when putting forward his own ideas for a "new form of capitalism".
It's intriguing, but unsurprising, to note in passing how marginal Brussels has been in the crisis. The European Central Bank in Frankfurt is a big player - bigger than the Bank of England - though notoriously cautious in a German sort of way.
But national governments still matter much more, whatever diehard Eurosceptics have kept saying to frighten us. Yet one significant qualifier to that claim is tucked away in the Guardian's lead story this morning, one that I haven't yet spotted elsewhere.
The paper reports that the dividend ban was one of 10 conditions that the EU competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, insisted upon before nodding the UK bail-out through under EU competition rules. The Treasury was said to have argued that the punitive 12% interest rate on the taxpayers' largesse was incentive enough to pay it back fast.
Yet this is precisely the point on which the three nationalised banks are now protesting. That might get a lot of people mad, so it's one to watch.
As is Brown's political health. That recovery since the plan went viral must have been welcome to No 10; "He's got his dignity back," as one former cabinet ally told me, before adding: "but will it last?"
Good question. Some MPs I talk to think that when the dust is more settled GB should do what they wanted him to do before the latest crisis: use his expertise in international finance and the boost to his prestige to accept an international job.
Building the new regulatory architecture he has been talking about in recent speeches, for example. I don't believe this will happen, but the "quit while you're ahead" scenario is not completely daft.
Whenever Brown got really cross waiting for Tony Blair to pack his bags he would brief that he was thinking of taking the top job at the IMF. It is normally reserved for a European (will that now change too?) and currently held by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former French socialist finance minister.
But it would mean schmoozing with foreigners quite a lot and I can't see him doing that. But if he plunges again as the real economy tanks then the options I have persistently dismissed (which Labour minister would do better?) may float back to the surface.
As William Hague said at PMQs yesterday, that much-repeated Brown mantra - "No more boom and bust" - is one of those hostages to fortune he will find it hard to talk himself out of in darker days.
