O dear: the government is making the same mistake with the housing market as those finance directors who launch buy-back programmes into a falling market. The weight of the buying is insufficient to push values higher and the purchasers soon realises they have overpaid.

The preview of the Queen’s Speech flagged a scheme to provide £200m for buying new homes and renting them out. The government may now be spending money like it is water, but luckily that sum is peanuts in terms of the housing market. It will probably purchase fewer than 1,000 homes – though that should be welcomed by a beleaguered house building sector.

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Alistair Darling flips his 10p coin and instead of tails, 5m people lose, it is heads, 22m win. Yet Darling emerges as a loser either way. He has dug a large hole to get himself out of a small one and he now needs to dig an even bigger one to extricate himself from the latest tax changes. And despite his largesse, he has received no glory.

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Poor UK postal services are forcing an increasing number of companies to seek alternatives to the state provider - which principally means TNT or UK Mail. They now handle more than one letter in five delivered in Britain and could easily double that, very possibly taking a majority of the mail.

The more successful the private providers become, the weaker Royal Mail will be. But this is not a classic model of splitting market share: these new rivals to the state monopoly are not only competitors of Royal Mail, they are its customers too.

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Fines of €1.7bn may be as financially insignificant to mighty Microsoft as a parking fine but the US computer software group is fighting the EU’s penalties with the determination of a motorist who knows he is right – even if he also knows that the odds are loaded in favour of the system.

Microsoft is appealing against the record €899m fine imposed in February for alleged anti-competitive practices. That was on top of €497m penalty imposed in 2004 and the €281m that followed two years later.

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The pound is strong against the dollar and weak against the euro. Something is wrong and it is the dollar.

While Britain historically measures the strength of its currency against the US currency, our trade is with our European neighbours so we are net losers from this foreign exchange imbalance but it is one that will surely start to turn.

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Some organisations – government, bodies like the Bank of England and even a few companies – keep a register of hospitality received by their employees. Lord Woolf’s report on (and for) BAE Systems suggests a log of gifts given.

The former Lord Chief Justice was asked to produce his report because BAE’s critics think gifts are a synonym for bribes.

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With the oil price rising through $10 a barrel, the only thing likely to halt the escalation is recession. But if economies go into recession, one of the main causes will be the high oil price.

This is not so much a circular argument as a self-correcting mechanism, like the governor on a steam engine. Oil prices rise, economies slow, the demand for oil falls and the price of the commodity deceases accordingly.

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“This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Bank of England governor Mervyn King could have borrowed those words from Winston Churchill – delivered at the Mansion House, just opposite the Bank, in 1942 – for his latest stability report. He did not exactly sound the all-clear on the credit crunch but he has suggested the worst is over.

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The UK Treasury may not be able to match Ireland’s 12.5 per cent corporate tax rate, but sooner or later it is going to have to make concessions on company taxation to ensure there are companies to tax.

The drip of British businesses re-registering abroad, especially to Dublin, is turning into a steady stream and the more that go, the more acceptable and the easier it is for others to follow. United Business Media and Shire are showing that the brass plaque can be moved offshore while leaving the business and management exactly where it always has been.

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Remember the old woman who ate a spider because she had swallowed a fly? Next she swallowed a bird to deal with the spider – then a cat. The government would do well to study the nursery rhyme as it tries to extricate itself from the mess of the 10p tax band.

Ministers started by wanting to cut the 22p income tax rate. Abolishing the 10p band was the spider to deal with that. Now it is considering invoking a bird in the form of the minimum wage. At some point it must realise that each solution is worse than the problem it is designed to overcome.

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