The figures are mind-bogglingly large: assets of over £1.2 trillion and total liabilities more than double that.  Of course, I am talking about the preliminary unaudited whole of government accounts recently published by the Treasury for the March 2010 year-end.  This is the first time that consolidated figures have been produced covering the more than one thousand organisations across central government, local government, the NHS and public corporations.

This week has seen a number of stories about executive pay. We have had Shell announce that they will freeze executive directors' salaries for a year. The top two executives in Barclays have forgone their multi-million pound bonuses and cut their company's pay to revenue ratio from 44 per cent to 38 percent. Whereas HSBC is likely to court controversy with reports of 30 to 40 per cent salary increases for top executives.