Small- and medium-sized businesses need access to a diverse range of finance options, including non-bank lending. These new forms of finance are still small in scale today but they should, over time, bring additional choice and greater competition to the lending market.

Fundamental renegotiation is very, very unlikely to produce any significant change

When Gordon Brown becomes prime minister, the balance sheet that reflects his economic stewardship could look very sickly indeed. He could become Labour's biggest liability, not its most marketable asset.

Regulators are a backstop: they don't own banks. The governance at the top of our leading banks has been shown to be lamentably weak. No one at the top of Barclays will take responsibility for systemic abuse.

And humility in politics means accepting that one party doesn't have all the answers; recognising that working in partnership is progress not treachery.

Britain is no longer one of the world's price setters. It is painful. It is a challenge to us in government to explain all that, and it is a pity that the political class is not preparing the public for it to understand how massive the problem is.

The degree of leverage now being reversed is on a staggering scale, and the underlying global imbalances – notably between the savers and the spenders – will require long and painful adjustment.