General Motors has the ultimate sales strategy. It churns out millions of gas-guzzlers every year, two lanes wide and each one emblazoned with a proud American badge – a motor from motown. If you’re American, they reason, what could be nicer than buying an automobile handcrafted by your fellow countrymen?

Even when this sales pitch doesn’t bear fruit – as has been the case as thousands of Americans have opted for more reliable and cost-effective imports from Asia – they win. The US government announced last night that the American taxpayer is to take a majority shareholding in the stricken motor giant.

GM’s advertising campaign may as well state:

GM: Either buy our cars or buy us out.

In The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson redraws parallels between the financial services sector and Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest. The biggest and best institutions swallow up smaller or struggling prey and get bigger and stronger by doing so. The notion of a bank or corporation being “too big to fail” is, according to Ferguson, a deeply unhealthy one.

If an institution needs propping up or risk toppling smaller prey, let it fall; the financial ecosystem will be neccessarily healthier in the long run as a consequence.

The American taxpayer has a right to be pretty annoyed by this effective nationalisation of a company so clunkingly out of date that it continues to make wheezing 4×4s for outback dwellers who haven’t heard of Japan let alone a ‘Civic hybrid’. More worrying should be the precedent set by a company who’s business plan is openly unsustainable being helped out by lender of last resort.

If dinosaurs still stalked the earth, we wouldn’t be here. The US administration needs to be bolder with its big guns and let them fall.

Some of you may have noticed a change in the demeanour of our Prime Minister. Although he’s not quite started entertaining at childrens’ parties under the alter-ego Gordo the Clown – he’s still as dour as a Nairn’s oatcake – he has started to look more comfortable in himself.

He now has a purpose; a tangible situation at which he can throw himself. He has a reason for those masochistic 20-hour days. The global financial crisis has been a blessing for Brown.

Now he has the opportunity to call upon all his finance experience and City acumen. As chancellor for a decade, Brown presided over a period of almost unprecedented growth, with low interest rates and controllable inflation. It was the new jazz age in London. Many, many people got obscenely rich, facilitated by a Brown led, risk-fuelled system of lending. Many more people had their pension’s dissolved or lost. More still borrowed beyond their means.

That was the boom and – let’s be clear here – it was a boom during which Brown was at the helm. His actions led to a wild, risky and ultimately rotten financial system. Not that any of us were complaining at the time.

Now comes bust, and the prime minister is leaning on his ‘experience’ to steer us through. The problem is, Brown has no experience whatsoever of presiding over bust. In that sense, he’s as qualified to run the economy as I am to chair the City University Quantum Mechanics Club.

Camilla Cavendish, writing for the Times, commended a prime minister ‘who commands new attention on the world stage after his daring rescue of British banks.’ Brown’s ‘daring’ came during the early part of this decade. Now, he is taking action simply because he has no choice. Just as America’s troubled asset relief plan was inevitably passed in Congress, Brown and Darling have acted out of a fear of inaction. This is not the same as being decisive.

Reading as a group today the transcript from Brown and David Miliband’s press conference which followed an EU meeting on the financial crisis, people were tempted to attribute the five new banking beatitudes to our man. Brown didn’t come up with it – not even his advisers. It was a multilateral agreement forged internationally. And if Brown is to take credit for it, it will not be the first hypocrisy.

Brown and his advisers are keen to point out this is a “global financial crisis”, with heavy emphasis on “global”. World fuel and food prices are up, he says. It’s not solely my fault that we’re in this mess.

To say that the crisis is entirely Brown’s fault would be madness – albeit madness scrawled on David Cameron’s fridge in magnets. It is a crisis arising from the globalisation of capital and financial systems – Britain is just an over sized cog in the ailing machine. Fine. Brown’s not all to blame for the bust.

So why do his supporters still insist that Britain’s economic prosperity of 1995 – 2007 was his brainchild? “Gordon oversaw a period of sustained economic growth.” No he didn’t. He was just sat in the seat as the global autopilot whisked us to the stratosphere.

The contradictions continue. Brown, speaking to Sky News last week, said:

“Let’s never forget we are talking about households that are paying higher fuel bills as a result of global oil prices, we’re talking about small businesses that are lacking capital because of a global financial crisis, we’re talking about couples and families that cannot get mortgages because of a global crisis, we’re talking about families and communities hit by unemployment because of this global financial crisis.”

Let us never forget that ‘couples and families’ are losing their homes via a bank owned by the government. Northern Rock aren’t exactly helping these families.

Fortunately or – more likely – accidentally, the public seem to see through any such talk of a ‘Brown bounce’. The latest polls show that Brown’s ‘pioneering’ approach to this problem has not improved opinion of Labour. This could be because most people don’t like the idea of Brown making political hay as their roofs let in the thunderstorm.

Whatever the reason, let’s hope these figures put pay to talk of a snap election. Brown hasn’t changed that much. He’s still desperate to cling to the position for which he clawed at Blair’s door for a decade. As Daniel Finkelstein says on his blog: “The idea that [Brown] was resurgent was largely the result of one journalist copying another.”

Today’s ultra-instant communication means that journalists sometimes get ahead of themselves. It means that we have developed rather short-term memories. Thankfully, the public can hold a grudge like the Black Mamba. When this prickly crisis turns into dull recession, when 2 million are unemployed by Christmas and when inflation means the elderly can’t heat themselves or rely on their pensions – they will remember who lead them there.

The credit crunch, although an immediate positive for Brown, will, come the next General Election, be an erstwhile prime minister’s eulogy.