Gordon Brown last night backed away from plans for a recession-busting spending spree in next month's budget, after City investors delivered a stern message about the health of the public finances by shunning a sale of government debts for the first time since 2002.

In New York to canvass support for a deal at next week's G20 London summit on a worldwide economic rescue package, the prime minister said he had no plans to add to the £20bn fiscal stimulus announced by Alistair Darling last autumn, saying there were other "effective and quicker ways" of kick-starting demand.

read more at The Guardian

We mere mortals have nothing to gain either way... Although it might give us another — or one less — spoonful of thin gruel at the end of the day by plodding along... Keep plodding. There is value in plodding. Plodding stocks should move up... But don't over-plod. This would burn the planet's ecosystem...

From the NYT

VIENENBURG, Germany — Last month Frank Koppe gathered together all 50 of his employees at Koppe-Apparatebau for coffee, cake and the kind of bad news that has lately become all too familiar. He told them the small company’s business, designing and manufacturing custom equipment for industrial plants, had been sliced nearly in half.

But rather than resorting to layoffs, Mr. Koppe asked half his employees to come in every other week. The government would make up roughly two-thirds of their lost wages out of a fund filled in good times through payroll deductions and company contributions.

The program — known as “Kurzarbeit,” which translates as “short work” — and others like it lie at the heart of a heated debate that has erupted on the eve of next week’s Group of 20 meeting of industrialized and developing nations and the European Union, creating a rift between the Obama administration and European governments. The United States is pressing for a coordinated package of stimulus plans by member countries to encourage economic growth, something that Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek of the Czech Republic, which holds the European Union presidency, has called “a way to hell.”

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The Yankee financiers have really bungled it... No thrift, all balls-up... And it's likely to carry on with "prudentials" that are as elastic as a neozealandish bungee... After the plunge, you end up and down until you end up down... And with the new distortions, one is likely to end up with a dunking in the rapids...