On Radio 2's Clive Anderson Chat Room the other day I was skilfully teased by Julian Clary, albeit in a kindly way. What had I done to deserve it? Merely suggest that it may be an encouraging sign that Warren Buffett, the Sage of Omaha, has been buying back into the market – via a hefty slice of Goldman Sachs, acquired on terms both humiliating to the bank and thus well-deserved.
But old Warren is less easily dissed. Unlike most pundits, bankers and politicians across the western world – hey, let's make that the eastern world too – Buffett deserves to be heard.
Not just because he has become one of the richest people in the world while still living frugally in distant Nebraska – on the high plains just east of the Rockies - the American equivalent of Worcester or Stafford, but not so handy for Selfridges.
Also because he ignored the clamour and the bullshit of the bubble years and always made sure that his firm, Berkshire Hathaway, was investing where the people he was investing with had their own money at risk too. He is famously patient and buys into businesses he understands – not into toxic housing debt.
Public Service Radio, which is America's impoverished answer to the BBC – it's a sort of Radio 4 without any money – sent a reporter to Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting ("Woodstock for capitalists" as the old joke goes) to pick up some of the sage's advice which is always interesting. He's lost money this past year, but remains optimistic.
I intend to send the link to my new best friend, Julian, who at least made the audience laugh. That's important at a time like this, it's going to generate a boom for comedians and grounded optimists like Buffett.
At least I hope it will. Did you notice how the Treasury package has been generally well received, by sensible commentators as well as the usual weather vanes and airheads. As I type the London stockmarket seems to be recovering a little from this week's suicidal dithering (their's not Whitehall's) on the ledge. Even the cartoonist, headline writers and bankers may get there in the end.
I am wholly unqualified to judge the three-point Treasury plan which pledges £50bn to buy bank shares as may be requested; up to £250bn to guarantee to insurers and pension funds that money loaned to banks is secure; £200bn to enlarge the Bank of England's special liquidity scheme that allows the banks to exchange dodgy debt for government bonds: all that and an interest rate cut of 0.5% which we can all understand.
But some are even talking about it as a model for other states to follow, comparing it favourably with the Paulson bail-out in the US. As with the Man Booker prize - alas, the season of literary hype has come round again, so soon – it is often parochial to make such comparisons.
But the provisional consensus is hardening that Henry Paulson was wrong to let Lehman Brothers go bankrupt – taking vast assets and debts with it – and Alistair Darling wiser to give shareholders great scope for long-term hope.
We shall see. But we learn every day. On radio this morning Liam Halligan, one of those know-it-all pundits we love to deplore, pointed out that, with inflation still rising and interest rates cut to 4.5%, Britain now has negative interest rates – as it did in the hair-raising 70s – rates lower than inflation.
Tim Congdon, a take-no-prisoners monetarist, snapped back that there is nothing in that for homebuyers paying 5-7% on home which have lost 15% of their value.
This is true, and predictions of deflation - falling prices which are nastier than rising ones (the Japanese suffered them throughout the 90s) - have now overwhelmed the Bank of England's warnings against inflation.
But that's the point. All this turbulence produces both winners and losers. Inflation would be bad for my pension prospects but would erode my childrens' mortgages. Scary times then, which some people are now calling the biggest collective trauma this country has experienced since – wait for it - not the great crash or WWII – but Princess Diana's death. Not quite such a daft point actually.
What more can I say to cheer you up? Only that I read in Ben Macintyre's Times column that Sir Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientists of all time (and that's not Man Booker prize hyperbole), was not immune to collective hysteria. No, he didn't put his pension into an Icelandic bank. Even worse, he invested in the great folly of 1720 known as the South Sea Bubble. Newton lost £20,000. Proper money.
