How much were central banks, notably the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve, to blame for the financial boom and bust that's landed us with years of economic stagnation? To date, most of the blame has been attached to the recklessness of bankers and myopia of financial regulators, such as the Financial Services Authority. But central bankers have typically been tarnished only with failing to see or shout...

The Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee says that the UK's big banks do not have enough capital "to ensure resilience in the face of the prospective risks". So it is advising them to raise external capital as protection against possible future losses "as early as feasible". In the meantime, this new body - which will soon have statutory powers to enforce its will - is urging the banks to...

BT's vast pension fund, with liabilities greater than £40bn, has been a great millstone for the company. So the company's owners will be relieved that in the three-yearly valuation, the deficit between assets and those liabilities has more than halved from £9bn to £4.1bn. Also BT is accelerating payments to fill the gap - by paying £2bn into it before the end of the month and will then make a further nine annual...

BT's vast pension fund, with liabilities greater than £40bn, has been a great millstone for the company. So the company's owners will be relieved that in the three-yearly valuation, the deficit between assets and those liabilities has more than halved from £9bn to £4.1bn. If all goes well, the scheme - on which hundreds of thousands of current and past staff are dependent for their pensions - will be back to health...

The chancellor told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the 50p tax rate he inherited from the last Labour government was a "con" that the rest of the world "laughs at". What he meant by that is the people it was supposed to tax have been adept at exploiting devices to avoid paying it. So, he claims, it yielded very little and cutting it to 45p in the pound will cost virtually nothing. Hmmm. The...

If there is such a thing as a collective business view, then business got as much as it could have hoped from this Budget. There is an extra one percentage point off the corporation tax rate, which will now be 24% on 6 April - one of the lower rates in developed economies, and down from 28% at the last election. The cash benefit of that additional cut will be more than £800m a year in two years, says the Treasury....

Senior LibDems argue that the 7% stamp duty rate being introduced in today's budget on residential properties worth more than £2m is not far off a mansion tax. It is equivalent to more than 0.5% a year for a property held for 10 years. And if it is actually paid, the annual yield could be hundreds of millions of pounds a year - such has been the inflation in the prices of swanky homes in London and the south east over recent years....

Putting to one side the argument over whether it is a good idea or a bad idea to cut the top rate of income tax, what everyone I speak to (outside of government) regards as spectacularly weird is the plan to delay the cut. Some of you will regard this as the equivalent of debating whether Attila the Hun was kind to his mum, rather than his more conspicuous claims to a place in history. But the delay to the tax reduction is puzzling....

Here are a dozen things you need to know about credit easing, or what the government calls the National Loan Guarantee Scheme. 1) It is a government subsidy for borrowing by small businesses with turnover up to £50m. 2) Initially the Treasury will make £5bn of loans available at an interest rate one percentage point below what those businesses would typically pay to borrow. 3)...

The government believes that by handing over responsibility to the private sector for maintenance and expansion of motorways and trunk roads via long leases it would get more bang for its buck - and it hopes that drivers would be pleased to see that government revenues of perhaps a billion pounds a year had been pledged for the long term, not any longer subject to annual budget haggling. David Cameron's idea appears to be that the private sector would do...