Seat of the pants economics?

Clear evidence of the impact money draining out of the economy is having on business is everywhere.
Companies have been falling into administration, jobs are being lost, and the drop in demand for the numbers of chairs in offices even claimed Nottingham office equipment firm Bennett Sykes on Monday – a clear sign that businesses have been scaling back investment.
Yet with the New Year only days old, the economic and political nonsense continues unabated.
What is it? Nonsense 1 is Gordon Brown's heavily-spun claim that the Government will create up to 100,000 jobs to help soften the blow of recession.
The simple issue with this claim is how do you prove it? Let's put it into perspective: in normal times, more than 53,000 jobs are actually created every week across the range of the UK economy.
So how do we know what jobs the Government has created and how many were going to happen anyway?
Or whether they were jobs which were likely to happen in the future and have simply been brought forward by Government spending?
The bigger issue is that in normal times up to 50,000 jobs disappear every week in the routine churn of the economy. It is likely to be higher than that now, which begs the question of how significant those putative 100,000 jobs would be anyway.
No one wants to sound churlish, but spin doesn't solve a recession. And the Government has some very recent form on the way it plays statistics.
Nonsense 2 surrounds rumours of the Government engaging in a second bank bail-out.
As fellow blogger Lobbydog was quick to point out HERE, this would be a political embarrassment for a Government which made great play of the soundness of its original bank bail-out. So days after the idea was floated we are being told that it won't happen a second time.
Something is in the pipeline, though.
In the next few weeks I suspect we will see increasing talk about the Government or the Bank of England creating a mechanism that takes some of the risk out of banks lending money to businesses.
As some of the administrations that cropped over Christmas have demonstrated, banks are calling in business loans left, right and centre ['calling in' being demanding the money back or refusing to roll it over into a new loan]. This is one of the reasons why some businesses are falling over at the moment.
Partially underwriting loans may not be giving the banks money, but it would be more or less saying that if a business defaults the taxpayer will shoulder a chunk of the loss.
Which is another way of lessening the financial stress on weak banks.
However you dress it up, it's an admission that while pouring money into the banks has stopped them falling over, it hasn't actually done anything about a credit crunch which has, if anything, been getting worse.
I don't imagine businesses care what the Government calls it or how the Bank of England does it. They just want action – and fast.