A Swindon musician has become a hit on the internet after writing a song about the credit crunch.

Alex Yeoman wrote and filmed a video under the name Antan Debt and has now had hundreds of thousands of hits online.

WARSAW: Poles were jolted last week by the sudden discovery that they were not immune to the financial crisis contagion rippling across the globe. The plunging stock market here and the drastic weakening of the Polish currency proved, as in so many corners of the fast-growing developing world, how wrong they were.

The go-go atmosphere in Poland has abruptly stilled to a cautious wait-and-see. Developers across the country have halted building projects for thousands of apartments as banks have grown stingy with lending. The boomtown energy here has been replaced by nervous eyeing of the once powerful zloty, as it retreats in value against the dollar and the euro.

The daily newspaper Dziennik summed up the mood on Friday with a front-page headline, "Welcome to the Tough Times." In a country that seemed to be on the fast track to full membership in the Western club, the question on everyone's lips is, "Why us?"

Emerging markets that seemed healthy, even thriving, barely a month ago, are beginning to find themselves caught in the worldwide panic. This sharp turn has caught even the local financial guardians and experts by surprise, as they have clung to their indicators of fundamental economic soundness, while forgetting that capital stampedes rarely tarry for fine distinctions.

"I haven't forgotten history," says Gert Heinz, a tax adviser in Munich. "If you depend on paper money you can lose everything. We've learned that the hard way after two world wars."

So when Chancellor Angela Merkel went on television recently to tell Germans that their bank accounts were safe, Heinz, who at 68 still remembers the rows of canned food that his mother hoarded in the attic, decided he would rather be safe than sorry.

He converted another chunk of his savings into gold and stocked up on a six-month supply of rice, sugar, flour and a special brand of milk powder that lasts for half a century.

Heinz may be an extreme example, but he is not alone among Europeans who are looking for ways to protect themselves in the face of a financial storm that - at least so far - has affected them much less directly than it has many Americans. Indeed, his reaction reflects the history of a Continent that has weathered wars, revolutions and financial crises over the centuries, burnishing national convictions that are very different from those in the United States.

A bank which provides investment to Eastern Europe has welcomed a decision by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help Ukraine and Hungary.

The IMF is to offer a $16.5bn (£10.4bn) loan to Ukraine and has agreed an as yet undisclosed package with Hungary.

"I think that is a very helpful role of the IMF," Erik Berglof at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) told BBC News.

Hungary's currency has gone up slightly on Monday against the euro.

NEW YORK: Five straight quarters of losses and a 70 percent slide in its stock this year have not stopped Merrill Lynch from allocating about $6.7 billion to pay bonuses.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, both still on track for profitable years, have set aside about $13 billion for bonuses after three quarters, down 28 percent from a year ago. Even some employees at Lehman Brothers, which declared the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history last month, will get the same bonus they received a year ago.

The worst U.S. financial crisis since the Great Depression, a $700 billion bailout, public outcry over excessive pay and the demise of three of the biggest securities firms will not deter Wall Street from offering year-end rewards to employees, compensation experts say.

"Critical producers and critical managers will be retained with the same bonus they had last year," said Robert Sloan, head of U.S. financial-services recruiting at Egon Zehnder International, an executive-search firm in New York. "The others will see sharp cuts."

Forecasters Race to Call the Bottom to the Market

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
Published: October 26, 2008, NYT

How low can the markets go? Some analysts are getting attention with pessimistic predictions, even if ill-founded.

Financial forecasters are in a race to call the bottom to the bear market. And just as on the way up, when analysts competed for attention with their forecasts of bigger and bigger gains, the financial pundit class now seems compelled to out-gloom the next guy.

"To make a crazy forecast today is not crazy," said Owen Lamont, a former professor at Yale who has studied economic forecasting. "It's not crazy to predict the Dow is going to 2,000. That's in the realm of possibility."

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And even if a forecast is off-base, there are few repercussions because they are almost always quickly forgotten. "The reason that people do these games is because no one's really tracking accuracy," said Mr. Lamont, who now works at DKR Capital, a hedge fund in Greenwich, Conn. "No one is carefully, prudently giving more business to the guy who is 2 percent more accurate than the next guy."

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Still, forecasters who get too far ahead of themselves would do well to remember an instance of notoriously poor prognostication. One of the few times that a financial strategist has been widely taken to task came in 1999, when Kevin A. Hassett and James K. Glassman published "Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market."

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Still, while the reputation of its authors may have taken a hit, "Dow 36,000" has not seemed to hurt their careers. Mr. Hassett, who did not respond to a reporter's inquiry, works at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group in Washington, and serves as the senior economic adviser to the presidential campaign of Senator John McCain.

Britain's financial system faces the possibility of further instability, with the health of insurers and hedge funds among the current areas of concern, the Bank of England warned on Tuesday.

In its twice-yearly Financial Stability Report, the Bank talked not only of significant risks remaining for the banking system - in spite of the £50bn bail-out that in recent weeks has shown signs of bringing some stability - but it also highlighted other potential worries.

Describing the instability in the global financial system as "the most severe in living memory", Sir John Gieve, deputy governor for financial stability, said: "With a global economic downturn under way, the financial system remains under strain."

Looking beyond the banks to other risks, the report said: "One risk is that leveraged investors, like hedge funds, may be forced to liquidate asset holdings due to tight credit conditions."

It added that hedge funds have recently faced "additional funding pressures due to redemption requests and a risk is that these could increase".

The International Monetary Fund may soon lack the money to bail out an ever growing list of countries crumbling across Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia, raising concerns that it will have to tap taxpayers in Western countries for a capital infusion or resort to the nuclear option of printing its own money.

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The IMF, led by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has the power to raise money on the capital markets by issuing `AAA' bonds under its own name. It has never resorted to this option, preferring to tap members states for deposits.

The nuclear option is to print money by issuing Special Drawing Rights, in effect acting as if it were the world's central bank. This was done briefly after the fall of the Soviet Union but has never been used as systematic tool of policy to head off a global financial crisis.

There has to be a first time for everything, but IMHO bailing out Western™ creditors is a bad use of the IMF's money. Funding trade guarantees is a better use of it.

A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith