This credit crunch never stops. Bail-outs of banks are happening all over the place. All over Europe and the US wobbly banks are being bought up, whether that's by the private sector, the public sector, or some combination of both.

It would be a foolish thing to suggest that this might be the low point of the credit crunch, so that's exactly what I'm going to do. The UK banks with the biggest exposures to the scary parts of the housing market have now been nationalised or taken over. Mortgage lending in the UK is so low now that it would seem it can't go any lower, and likewise LIBOR inter bank lending rates are at a record high. The US has come up with a plan that looks much more reasonable - at least from a US tax payers point of view. Even if it initially disappoints the markets, it will mean critical financial institutions have other options instead of being forced to the wall. It will mean banks that get support from the Fed must end big bonuses, and the fact that the government will hold stock in the companies it supports at least means there's a chance of US tax payers getting their cash back in the longer term.

Back in blighty at the Tory Conference, George Osbourne is busy trying to make political hay out the Bradford & Bingley nationalisation - despite the fact that the biggest losers of the deal appear to be shareholders in the (ex) bank. He says:

 "On Bradford and Bingley, we say you can protect people's deposits, you can try to save people's jobs, you can maintain people's confidence.

"But you don't have to leave the taxpayer exposed to a multi-billion pound bill for the mistakes of the management and the big money that backed them."

The Government had "dithered and delayed" in dealing with a problem they had known about for a year.

It is misleading in the least to say the government has sold tax payers short in this particular deal. It seems to me Alistair Darling has actually done pretty well. The way things are structued, the public purse may even make some cash out it in the long term. It is B&B shareholders that bear the pain, and in principle that is how it should be.

There's one scary thing for Scotland on the horizon. I note this nugget about traders who've been forced to stop shorting bank stocks who've moved to placing bets at the bookies. Guess which banks are being bet against:

Surprise, surprise but the most popular stocks have been Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB, which is about to buy HBOS, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, CitiGroup and Morgan Stanley.

RBS top of the list. As Jeff says - maybe it''s close to brown trousers time at Gogarburn?