In truth, nothing is going to work until the firestorm raging across global markets is stopped - and there is little sign of that today.
On Wall Street overnight the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged another 5 per cent despite steps by the Federal Reserve to revive credit markets.
In a self-feeding chain reaction, Japan’s stock market plummeted 9.4 per cent – its biggest one-day drop in 21 years. Investors rushed for the exits on deepening fears over the global financial crisis.
In Germany the Dax Index is down 4.8 per cent. In Russia trading on the stock market has again been suspended after two days of torrid selling.
And in London the FTSE100 Index has plunged another five per cent this morning. RBS was down 19 per cent at one point, before rallying to being "only" 9 per cent lower. The one share to rise in the index was HBOS - up by more than 25 per cent.
This is turning into a global panic with scatterbrain share price movements. Confidence is draining out of the global economy and we are down to the last cards in the pack.
This bank "rescue" has little chance of working until this global panic is checked. And that is going to take big action by the US Federal Reserve: a sweeping cut in US interest rates followed by back-up reductions in Europe and the UK.
Unless interest rates are cut sharply in the coming days and weeks, there will be little prospect of early stabilisation. And that ominously points, not to recession but Depression - a severe and prolonged recessions, tens of thousands of business failures, many of them top line so-called "blue chip" companies, with millions thrown out of work and world trade in the doldrums. Duration? Could be two years or more.
Will the bank package work against a background of falling interest rates? It would stand a better chance.
Here are the outline details - and what a pity that the BBC Radio 4 Today programme did not concentrate on getting the chancellor to spell out more details, rather than the ridiculous rotweiler grilling by John Humphries comparing support for the banks to the National Health Service. Oh, please!
The government has pledged up to £50 billion of fresh capital and a special liquidity scheme offering at least £200 billion of money to keep the lending markets moving.
Eight financial institutions have agreed to take a capital injection totalling £25 billion from the government, namely Abbey,Barclays, HBOS,HSBC, Lloyds TSB,Nationwide Building Society, Royal Bank of Scotland and Standard Chartered.
The capital injections is likely to be in the form of preference share capital or PIBS (permanent income bearing shares) and will be done by the end of the year. In addition to this, the Government stands ready to provide an incremental minimum of £25 billion of further support for all eligible institutions.
Terms and amounts per bank have yet to be set. But the government warned that it 'will need to take into account dividend policies and executive compensation practices and will require a full commitment to support lending to small businesses and home buyers.' Quite right.
On top of this the government also said it will make at least £200 billion available to banks under the Special Liquidity Scheme through auctions to lend sterling and dollars. It will offer a guarantee of new short and medium term debt issuance to assist banks in refinancing maturing, wholesale funding obligations as they fall due. It said it expects the take-up of the guarantee to be of the order of £250bn, and will keep this under review alongside ongoing monitoring of capital positions and lending volumes.
That sounds a sensible and flexible package to me - appropriate and merited, and which, once the smoke clears, should start to bear down on those sky-high interbank lending rates. But it is going to take time - many weeks perhaps - before wholesale money markets return to sanity.
But make no mistake - we need big rate cut action - ASAP.
