Drawing a Map

What to make then of Mr Darling and Mr Brown's announcements yesterday regarding their package of measures to stimulate the housing market?

Was it a measure designed to help first time buyers and the most at risk mortgage holders? Yes, definitely. Was it the last, desperate measure by a failing partnership to convince their electorate that they still possess the nous and the nerve to provide a solution? Quite possibly. Will it make any real difference? That depends. And it depends on how far one can map out the current troubles.

I mean, have you ever actually sat down and tried to sketch out why we are where we currently are? Yes we know that food and oil and gas are more expensive than they used to be, and we also know that it costs more to pay a mortgage each month, and to pay off a credit card bill (my particular problem). But have you ever actually looked deeper than this top line? This is what I spent a good deal of time last night doing, and like any sensible person, after failing to draw a picture in my head, I got out the paper, the pencil and the ruler, and I sketched it out.

Or at least I tried to.

And yet, the more I tried to sketch it out, the deeper I got, the more paper I used, and eventually I had to give up. To see what I mean, just consider one aspect of the current crunch for a minute - let's take the high energy price.

Why is oil more expensive than it used to be? 'Ah, simple', many would cry, 'more poeple want it, there's less of it to go around, and what is available is more difficult to extratc'. But is it actually that simple? Not if you look at the production and consumption figures it's not. Whilst both those arguments are true, they don't explain the 18 month surge.

Likewise, the fact that banks lent a bucketload to people who clearly couldn't afford a mortgage doesn't wholely explain why we're all now struggling to pay off loans, mortgages and bills. A $13bn writedown isn't to be sniffed at (even if it does sound like an almost laughable sum of money), but then neither is a $13bn profit which had been the custom at many major banks for several years previous.

So what is it then? What, after several sheets of paper, two pencils, and a lot of scratching of chin did I arrive at? The answer, perhaps predictably, is that I arrived at the same conclusion as most economic commentators - trust, or lack thereof. No-one wants to lend to their former mates, because like said mate at the end of a night out, you're not really all that confident that your gesture will be returned to you in the future. The same applies to the energy shortages, the hunger problems and all those other issues listed by the UN on their millenial development goals spreadsheet. Trust you see, is an inherent necessity for progress, and unfortunately, we've been running a little short over the past couple of decades.

Think about it, have we really moved on that much since the 60's? We still use the same transport systems, still shop, eat and work the same way, still place our trust in the same political institutions. Of course, the reason we do these very things is because we trust in these staples of life, and this is a very good thing. But at the same time, this trust in the current is preventing our trust in new ideas, new directions and new technologies.

Perhaps it's fitting then, that as the Independent notes today, we're about to put our trust for the future in a 40 year old ex-one hit wonder who is to be the "poster child" for the new Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

Now that really is trust.