Here’s Jeff Randall at the Daily Telegraph:

Paul Krugman, professor of economics at Princeton University and Nobel prize-winner, wrote recently, “this looks an awful lot like the beginning of the second Great Depression”. Such a prospect cannot be accepted, at least not in public, by Mr Brown. He clings to the fantasy that, thanks to his genius of administration, British citizens are far better placed than competitors to handle a battering. Bit by bit, however, the credibility of that claim is being pulled apart by brutal facts, not least of which was the Office for National Statistics’ revelation that while the number of foreign workers getting jobs in the UK continues to grow (up by 175,000 to 2.4 million last year), domestic unemployment is rising sharply. Alistair Darling has given himself until April 22 to prepare his Budget, much later in the year than normal. At this rate, he’ll need every minute. According to Business Monitor International, a research company specialising in country risk, “Britain is facing an unprecedented fall in its economic world ranking… from 12th place in 2007 to 21st in 2010″. Its report, Britain on the Brink, says the UK economy is sliding out of the global premier league: “Despite enjoying 11 years of growth between 1997 and 2007, the UK ran a budget deficit of 1.7 per cent of GDP over this period, fuelling a fiscal time bomb. Faced with the financial burden of bailing out the banking sector and kick-starting the economy, the budget deficit will swell to an unsustainable 9.3 per cent of GDP in 2009.”

And then there’s this:

French and German ministers are expected to confront the Chancellor over sterling’s weakness at the opening dinner for the Group of Seven finance summit in Rome tonight. They will ask him to consider direct action to increase the value of the pound, which has suffered its worst devaluation since at least the final breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreement in the early 1970s. It came as the pound dropped further against a range of currencies, following the Bank of England’s unexpected acknowledgement earlier this week that it plans to start buying gilts imminently as part of its quantitative easing efforts. Sterling fell more than a cent against the dollar to $1.4248, although it did strengthen marginally against the euro.

Meanwhile Bloomberg News is reporting these remarks from an increasingly desperate-seeming Gordon Brown:

“We’re not trying to target the exchange rate like people used to do,” he said. “We’re targeting inflation. Where there is speculation…that is to be condemned. We’re not going to build our policies around the actions of a few speculators in New York.”

Older Brits will remember Harold Wilson fulminating about the ‘gnomes of Zurich’ and shudder.