I've been longing to get Northern Rock thoughts out of my system for days but I've been too busy with other things.

I hadn't picked up on the flaw in the Northern Rock business model - ie borrowing short and lending long - until panic was let loose at the weekend. My first thought was that there might have been some collusion among the bank's competitors not to lend to them. This would serve two purposes. Firstly, it would put the government and the Bank of England into a more helpful frame of mind about interest rates (lower ones might help bale them out from their mistakes) and, secondly, the other mortgage lenders might have a chance of getting back some house-mortgage market share.

However, apparently, the Northern Rock actually went looking for a buyer but the other banks were so short of ready billions that there was no interest.

As for what happened once the facility from the Bank of England had been announced, amazing is the only word for it. It seemed that lots of people who should have known better simply failed to say clearly enough that there was no threat to people's deposits. The Today Programme treated it as if it was a re-run of Equitable Life and Endowment Mortgage mis-selling. Opposition politicians used the occasion to criticise the government and made themselves sound a bit silly in the process; the very fact that they thought it was an opportunity for party political point scoring suggests that either the problem wasn't very serious or, if it was serious, they didn't know how to act appropriately.

The curious thing was that unless the folk who withdrew the cash were going to put under the mattress, the cash withdrawn was less safe (with other banks who hadn't yet got guarantees from the government) than if they'd left it in the Northern Rock. The people who really need to worry are those who have more than £35,000 in one bank - people in the middle of moving house, for instance.

As for the share price fall, that also bears no relation to sound judgment. The company has all those mortgages as assets and, despite what Alan Greenspan says, there is still a housing shortage over a lot of England so the value of all that collateral in houses isn't going to vanish overnight. Maybe here, too, collusion may need to be checked out. I see the share price has started to rise today; I might even buy some Rock shares myself.

With the Bank of England and the government sounding as if they are continually on the back foot, there's still been no move to make the banks divulge how much in dodgy CDOs they've got on their books. Northern Rock came clean by saying it had £200 million's worth (ie. not a great deal); what's to stop other banks producing these figures?

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Talking of Alan Greenspan, it was interesting to hear that he thinks the invasion of Iraq was all about oil. I disagree with that, too. It doesn't seem likely that Saddam Hussein was going to cut off supplies of oil to the West. That may sound cynical but the existing limitations on Saddam's freedom of manoeuvre were one of the reasons the invasion was wrong. The issue of the oil has grown more serious as a result of the invasion; the danger of the supplies stopping is greater now than it was in 2003. In fact in part it's happened because of the poor security situation. When the UK forces were withdrawing from the Basra Palace, it was puzzling that the news programmes made no reference to the need for some troops to stay in southern Iraq so that oil supplies could arrive there by pipeline and be taken away by oil tanker.

If this sounds cynical, I do believe that the Iraqis will have to be given back full control of the oil industry eventually but only when it's certain it's not going to fall under the sway of one sectarian interest (or Iran).

Now that we know that the US has a military base just outside the Iranian border, it looks as if the Democrats may be going to lose control of the foreign policy agenda again. This looks like a good thing if it means a tough line with Iran but the danger is that the US administration might be tempted act in a way that is out of proportion to the threat and end up making the situation worse.

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Not a lot to report on the home front. We've both had lingering colds but we did manage to get to the beach last Saturday and have a near perfect afternoon with the end of summer crowds.

Today I've been training with one of firms I do freelance work for. A Good, interesting time that whetted my appetite for doing more writing for them but for the moment I need to concentrate on the book I'm writing. I'm on a steep learning curve and I can see that I'm going to need a better of keeping on top of all the notes I'm making.