Martha Kearney's week

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By Martha Kearney Presenter, BBC Radio 4's World at One

"In this world, one thing counts - in the banks, large amounts!"

Will Gordon Brown be forced take a leaf out of Fagin's book?

As I watched Rowan Atkinson as Fagin in Oliver this week, his song struck a chord though I don't think he was singing about Tier One capitalisation.

The banks' fear that they don't hold large enough amounts of money to cover bad debts means they are still not lending enough to help businesses to survive the - now official - recession.

This week the government announced a whole series of measures to try to oil the wheels of the financial system.

The view from the Treasury is that there can be no way of telling how long the recession will last until the banking crisis is over.

Complex and high-risk

One Cabinet minister acknowledged to me this week that since Christmas this has been a very difficult time politically.

Not just because the recession is really beginning to bite - unemployment is moving further towards the two million mark - but because the measures they are announcing are so complex.

There's the asset protection scheme; the guarantee scheme for asset backed securities and the asset purchase facility, all designed to increase liquidity in the markets.

And if they don't work?

The economist Will Hutton told us that Britain was on the verge of becoming Iceland on Thames.

The view from the Bank of England is that the massive fiscal boost, the huge drop in interest rates and the fall in sterling -which will boost exports - should spur recovery but it could all take between one and two years to feed through.

Brown's aides acknowledge that such timing could prove very difficult for the government if its painful remedies aren't seen to be working by the time of the next election.

"It's on a knife edge", one told me.

Showing leadership

Meanwhile they hope that the meeting of G20 leaders in April will give the prime minister an opportunity to project that he can lead the world on the economy.

The Budget will be a difficult one because presumably the government will have to change its economic forecasts to reflect the sharp fall in growth.

Like Oliver Twist, ministers will hope for a happy ending to this story

But I can reveal that ministers want to make this a "Budget for the future" by focussing on green jobs and the low carbon recovery which Gordon Brown has described.

This is something which Barack Obama too has proclaimed will help the United States out of recession.

Jobs will be created in energy efficiency like making insulation products; in energy supply - building wind farms and new nuclear power stations - and in expanding public transport to meet the legally binding targets on cutting emissions.

But there is some nervousness in Whitehall about overpromising on this. Some of the jobs already exist and will simply mean a move across to newer technologies.

Others will take years to come on stream. That dose of realism is also hitting Obama's plans, I was told.

But the new president can tap into depths of good will and hope which are certainly not available to a government of eleven years standing which attracts at least some of the blame for the economic crisis.

Voters here too know that they will be paying for the government's rescue efforts in higher taxes.

As Fagin would say: "You've got to pick a pocket or two, boys, you've got to pick a pocket or two."

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