Well, if you're going to judge policy by whether it put a floor under how bad things got, clearly, we've seen a lot of success in terms of, as you say, preventing a complete banking sector meltdown because that was a very real risk. We've seen a floor put under asset markets. In fact, in many markets they've actually seen quite a pick up. So in equity markets, for example, we've seen a pretty big improvement and as you say, there is a sense that all of this didn't cost quite as much, certainly in terms of banking bailout, as perhaps had originally been assumed. Half is nowhere near as expensive as perhaps the headline number would have suggested and governments are suggesting ways of clawing the money back. So you're going to see banking levy in America. Obviously in the UK it looks like we're going to have some kind of super tax on bonuses. So all sorts of things going on which suggests that at least that bit of the money might be clawed back. But I do think it's really important to remember that actually the biggest reason why we didn't see the economic meltdown everyone feared wasn't the direct support into specific banks, it wasn't about the TARP Programme, it wasn't even about the direct bailout we saw, or nationalisation we saw in specific institutions in the UK or Europe. It was about this much more broad base policy support that we saw. The massive reduction in interest rates, the huge liquidity injections that swamped the system with money which benefited all banks, not just the ones that were specifically on the receiving end of government handouts and then of course the massive expansion in public sector deficits more broadly. So a massive increase in public sector spending, a massive reduction in the tax take that we saw and all of that government support sloshing through the economy. Now that was all very successful of course which did there again help to prevent the bottom dropping out of the global economic environment. But of course, now that's left us with an enormous fiscal hole and of course that's the challenge going forward. So it's all very well for governments to pat themselves on the back and say that our banking sector bailout didn't cost us very much money. They're running deficits the like of which none of us have seen in our lifetimes before. That's the problem. So I think patting on the back is probably a bit premature.

Well I think there is a desire. It's a politically driven desire really to claw this money back. I mean I don't think you're see similar sorts of exactly the same policy design being executed elsewhere. As I said, in the UK, you're seeing a different approach. They're trying to tax bonuses instead. You will see banking sector levies being raised in other countries too. But it's all relatively unimportant in comparison to the bigger fiscal problem that we see. I mean in the US, there's talk at the moment that the banking bailout currently estimated to cost $120b and probably at the end of the day, will be a little less than that. But relative to the size of the big expansion in the US Federal budget deficit, this is just nothing. It makes no difference at all to actually stabilising the public sector finances, so it really is a political issue rather than an economic one. The economic challenge which governments face is how to rein in the scale of the borrowing that we see and unfortunately for governments, these kind of super taxes on the banking sector are not the way that you're going to achieve that.

Well in most markets around the world you see that the property market has stabilised and in quite a few markets you see some improvement. The UK is a good example of that where you are seeing prices move up in some areas. But I think it is important to remember that in many markets - I think the US is probably one of these (the UK is certainly one of these) - you didn't see the scale of adjustment that perhaps you might have expected. That the government measures to stimulate the economy seem to have prevented a full adjustment in the housing market which suggests to us that transactions may be weak for quite a long period of time now because you're seeing a situation where the market hasn't really cleared properly and there is a real problem then in terms of the kind of the moribund level of volume, sales volumes, going on. In terms of whether people fully appreciate the impact that policy had on the property sector I suspect not. In fact, I think more broadly, people don't appreciate the impact that policy has had on the economy more broadly. Many economists, including us, were threatening that the situation could get extremely bad if governments didn't step up to the plate. Now in fact they did step up to the plate and you did see economies stabilising at perhaps a much higher level than many people had assumed, but that was all because of the extent of the policy stimulus. And of course the problems that we're going to face going forwards is how do you rein that stimulus in without allowing the economy to then spiral back down out of control. So that's a real problem. I think people simply do not appreciate how much government effort it took to prevent the scale of meltdown that we were all worried about.

Well at the moment we're not really seeing pledges of anything like the order of magnitude that we are going to have to see in order to stabilise the fiscal position. I think it's important to get the timing right here. Obviously the economy right now is very weak. Dramatic measures to rein in the deficit in the very short-term will probably be quite dangerous, certainly very risky. Just to step back even one point further, we're not saying for a second that the big expansion in public sector borrowing that we've seen wasn't right. It was right because it stabilised the economy, but now the challenge is to do something about that and it looks as if the measures which are currently being discussed - this is true in the UK, but it's actually true in many markets around the world - are simply nowhere near sufficient to bring about the sort of fiscal consolidation we have to see. Now of course, in the UK, the political cycle is very important. Here we have an election coming up probably in May. Prior to that, it's going to be very difficult for any of the major political parties to talk about the sorts of cuts that will actually be required. Those conversations unfortunately are going to have to happen pretty soon after the election and I think that participants in financial markets are watching that with a great deal of interest because while at the moment I suspect most investors are prepared to give both the current government and the opposition the benefit of the doubt because they know the electoral realities prevent politicians from talking too much about fiscal consolidation now, after the election, if the government is not able to quickly produce a credible strategy for consolidating the fiscal position, then a prudent investor would have to assume that the UK is going to move a lot closer to an insolvency situation than anyone thought was possible three or four years ago and bond prices and the exchange rate would react as a result of that. So I think what you're going to see is a kind of false floor where people trade, or politicians trade, very small unambitious cuts against each other in kind of the televised debates and then after the election something much more significant is going to have to get announced.

Yes. We think unemployment has not risen as quickly in this recession in most markets, certainly in Europe, as we might have expected. In the US obviously it has risen rather more quickly. In Europe, most governments have been pretty good at taking policy measures which have helped keep people in jobs. So we've seen measures to kind of subsidise employment or make it possible for people to go to part time work; all those sorts of things. That's meant unemployment hasn't risen as much as we might have expected. But I think when you look at the outlook for economic growth, what that suggests to us is that job creation going forwards is going to be pretty weak. So while unemployment may not continue to rise over the next three or four years, the idea that it's going to start to fall again I think is a little bit optimistic. That growth is actually going to be pretty subdued, that the government will be taking away from the economy rather than adding to it in the way that it has in the last year or so and as a result of that, the job creation situation is going to be a little bit moribund and unemployment is probably going to stay high for some time I'm afraid.