That shrinking feeling...

Mervyn King isn't exactly a laugh-a-minute stand up routine at the best of times, as anyone who saw him speak in Nottingham a couple of weeks ago will confirm.
He may as well have been delivering a funeral lament today.
Talking about a Bank of England report on the economy, he said we were in "deep recession", that the economy would shrink by a walloping 4%, and that when we come out of this slough of despond depends on what happens to the rest of the world.
This is spectacularly grim stuff, and it says the news about job losses and business failures is going to continue for a few more months yet.
Two points to bear in mind, though.
The last time the Bank of England produced a report like this, in November last year, some people though then that it was too optimistic. So the Bank may well have adopted the worst case scenario because it doesn't want to end up with egg on its face a second time.
And as drastic as that 4% economic contraction is (and it blows Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling's previous forecasts out of the water) a chunk of it has happened already.
Mr King hinted again (as he did in Nottingham) that the Bank may have to take steps far more drastic than fiddling with interest rates to get things going again.
This will almost certainly include printing more money so that High Street banks don't have to worry so much about their own cash when they hand out loans.
Another eye-catching prediction was his forecast that inflation is likely to fall to 0.5% over the next two years. Good news for those people who've got a steady income and/or money (because it means prices will stay low) but a clear sign of an economy bumping along the bottom even when it stops contracting.
The Bank is probably doing all it can to get the UK back on an even keel, but it has been criticised several times for taking big steps when giant leaps are needed.
It will take a while yet before the impact of some of those steps feed through fully into the economy you and me live in.
But if we're depending at least partly on the rest of the world's economies, what are they doing? Getting together in the UK in a few weeks' time to see if they can agree some coordinated action.
That will be followed by Alistair Darling playing what's almost certain to be a new hand of cards in the UK Budget.
But should we really be waiting that long?
UPDATE: Fancy spending an evening reading the runes of a Bank of England Inflation Report? Thought not. Luckily for you, I did.
I concluded my initial post by wondering whether, since we're in such serious trouble, we could afford to wait much longer for some serious action.
The Inflation Report suggests the Bank is itching to deploy the weapon known as quantitative easing, the means by which it effectively drops a load of new money into the accounts of banks.
When you put the detail of today's report together with the heavy hints about quantitative easing which Mervyn King and Monetary Policy Committee member David Blanchflower dropped in their respective speeches at the University of Nottingham recently, it now looks likely that the weapon may be deployed as early as next month.
If it does, the Bank and Gordon Brown in particular will be looking for very swift signs that the High Street banks are turning the lending tap back on again.
If you're in business and you need to borrow, book an appointment with the bank manager from the second week on March onwards.