Molly Scott-Cato

It has been a delight hearing Clive James on the Point of View slot on Sunday mornings. Ok, I'm showing my age now, because rather than razzing it up on Saturday night and lying in on Sunday morning I often catch not only this essay at 8.50 but actually also Something Understood at whatever horrendous time that is on.

The economy has ceased to grow, in fact it has begun to shrink. Interest rates are now at marginal levels and may soon drop to 0%. Combine this with the falls in stock prices and you realise that it is no longer possible to earn money from having money. These are the very characteristics of the steady state economy that greens have been calling for. So should we be celebrating?

For those who no longer sign up to the official Christian faith this time of year can be rather tiresome. The desperation of prelates has reached such a pitch that they will resort to almost anything to fill their churches. A few years ago I went to a service where the vicar was performing a conjuring trick on the high altar with a children's ball and three plastic buckets.

There's nothing I love as much as a critical accountant - just thinking about the juxtaposition of those two words is delightful. It is a subversive job title. I recently attended a seminar by Jean Shaoul, Professor of Public Accountability (there's another subversive job title) at Manchester Business School and one of the UK's leading critical accountants.

I was recently commissioned to answer some questions about where on earth the government is getting all of this money from - a question asked by many in pubs and on buses up and down the land. Irritatingly, they did not then publish the answers I had spent time considering, so I offer it now, in a temporary change to the style of the blog. Comments and corrections are welcome.

What is government borrowing?

The private market banks have failed and the function of banking has moved into the public sector. But, taking one step bank, we see that the function of creating money in the private market has also failed. Reducing interest rates, i.e. making money cheaper to borrow, has not managed to stimulate the money creation system that is privately operated, and relies on debt for its existence.

My friend Barbara Panvel posts weekly at The Stirrer: 'campaigns that count in Birmingham, the black country and beyond'. Her latest post is addressed to Helicopter Ben - Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve who is now following up on Milton Friedman's suggestion that dropping money from helicopters might be a way to deal with deflation.

I've just spent a sublime half hour in Tewkesbury Abbey for choral evensong. There were another four people enjoying the transcendently beautiful singing, from the men's voices of the Schola Cantorum, who outnumbered us by about two to one. This tradition of singing evening prayers has been going on in our cathedrals for around a thousand years, kept alive by the dedication of those who value the ethereal rather than the financial. Once might say the same about our Gloucestershire apple varieties and old spot pigs.

I enjoy discussing a conspiracy theory over a pint as much as the next person and, given the shallow and irrelevant nature of most media chat on issues of importance, one can only really gain a sense of what is really afoot from trying to read the clues. I would condemn this as undemocratic and unaccountable government in normal times, but just now I am seriously hope that what we see is not going to be what we actually get.

On Monday Alastair Darling will announce his plans for borrowing. He will be quite explicit in his hypocrisy. All the ideological ranting we have listened to for the past 40 years about how spending would destroy the economy has suddenly been abandoned. Was it wrong for all those years? Or is our economy so close to collapse that all the rules we have lived by can be gleefully abandoned?