The banking crisis tells us it's time to buy gilts

We're in a solvency crisis, not a liquidity crisis, says James Ferguson. And in times like these, banks develop an appetite for risk-free assets - government bonds.

The decision to spend taxpayers' money to boost banks' balance sheets, and the 1.5% base-rate cut last month, show that the authorities now grasp what I've been saying all along. This is a solvency crisis, not just a liquidity crisis and it's across the board, not solely restricted to a few badly run banks.

And despite what looks like a worrying rise in debt, Alistair Darling's huge gilt-issuance plan suggests that the Treasury has been reading up on what a systemic banking crisis looks like. After all, it's not as if they're all that rare. The World Bank has identified 117 banking crises worldwide since the early 1970s (not including the recent rash, of course). The Bank of England itself has studied in detail 33 mainly first-world banking crises between 1977 and 2002. So they really should all know by now how such scenarios play out, despite Gordon Brown's attempts to portray himself as the only European politician with any idea of what policy to pursue next.

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James Ferguson qualified with an MA (Hons) in economics from Edinburgh University in 1985. For the last 21 years he has had a high-powered career in institutional stock broking, specialising in equities, working for Nomura, Robert Fleming, SBC Warburg, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and Mitsubishi Securities.