Recently by John Cranage

Like a slow-to-die Hollywood movie monster thrashing around until the credits roll, the bubble created by central bankers and politicians who mistake living on tick for prosperity may have been pricked, but it is going to do a lot more damage before it deflates to manageable proportions.

The worse of the credit squeeze may be over, with inter-bank three-month spreads well off their peaks, but the retail banks are only now starting to count the cost of their near-criminal profligacy.

It's a good world, the world of the well-meaning. Got a problem? Just speak nicely to whoever's causing the trouble and all will be well.

That's the theory. Whether or not, in a naughty world, it works is another matter.

The police are trying it in Redruth in Cornwall where anti-social teenagers have been making life hell for the peaceable and law-abiding. There's now a curfew in place aimed at getting troublemakers off the streets by 9pm. Except it is voluntary. Which presumable means that those who believe their right to misbehave trumps the right of others to peace and quiet will simply ignore it.

In another world entirely, much the same thing is being tried to get private equity companies to do what doesn't come naturally to such beasts and sign up to a code designed to show the world that they're not the jobs-destroying, asset-stripping, tax-avoiding, debt junkie bandits of the bottom line they're popularly believed to be.

Have the banks - still reeling from the sub-prime fiasco - got another money-losing trick up their sleeves?

Quite possibly, according to Roger Bootle, the MD of Capital Economics and the man who acts as adviser to Deloittes.

He was writing in The Daily Telegraph on the theory that commodities, including oil, have come to resemble yet another speculative bubble that is now about to burst.

The golden rule for those at the top of the quangocracy that rules so much of our lives is that the more you are paid the less you are expected to spend your own money - on anything.

We learned last week that the chairman of the governors of the BBC, Sir Michael Lyons, is putting his subscription to Sky on his taxpayer-funded expenses. It cost us £459, including installation fees, to enable the former chief executive of Birmingham City Council to put his feet up at home and find what the opposition is doing. He doesn't have to fork out for a television set or a DVD recorder. According to the BBC's accounts, they're "lent" to him.

It's good to think that a region whose prosperity has been based on planet-destroying (if you believe the eco doomsters) internal combusion engines is quietly whirring its way to a battery-powered future.
That is the scenario that emerged when Birmingham vanmaker LDV announced that an electric variant of its successful Maxus light van will go on sale as early as July.
LDV will be joining Coventry-based Modec, which has come from nowhere to global leader in about two years, in the zero emissions commercial vehicle field.

I spend much of working life trying to keep track of two key strands to the industrial and financial life of this country.

Wearing my Birmingham Post automotive correspondent's hat I report on a manufacturing sector that, despite what the cynics and doom-mongers say, is still a vital element of the manufacturing base both of the West Midlands and the UK as a whole as well as the regional and national economy.

There are some out there who simply cannot understand why Britain is still making motor cars in the 21st century.

Yes, we have lost Longbridge, Ryton and Browns Lane as major carmaking sites. But Jaguar and Land Rover (albeit perhaps soon in Indian ownership) remain at the heart of the industry.