Northern Rock has been nationalised. A report by the Commons treasury select committee on how various government institutions failed has meant little to anyone except insiders. The government is canvassing complicated proposals to increase banks' compensation to depositors whose money they lose in future. And a distinctive feature of the budget was its 23 motherhood-and-apple-pie references to "financial stability".
Meanwhile, the global credit crunch is spreading and deepening. Complicated calculations suggest that the billions of dollars, euros and pounds already "lost" by banks are turning into trillions, but even the banks themselves don't know how much it really is.
What we do know is that, once again, governments' failure to control the greed of bankers is creating financial disaster for many innocent people; and that, once again, officialdom has failed to ask the basic questions about why this has happened, and to give answers in words that normal citizens can understand.
At the heart of the matter is the fact that commercial banks are allowed to create almost all the money we use. They create it out of thin air and put it into circulation in the form of profit-making loans. They credit those to their customers' accounts by a simple accounting procedure, and their customers spend the money into circulation.
This bank-account money is the money that all of us, people and organisations alike, have in our bank accounts. It is held in electronic form in bank computers. It is far and away the largest part of the money supply. The rest, less than 5% in this country, is "cash". This is issued by agencies of the state in the form of paper banknotes by the Bank of England and metal coins by the Royal Mint.
The key question is this: did the banks' privilege of creating bank-account money to lend to one another play a significant part in fuelling the credit bonanza, subprime market and financial boom that bust, leaving such a tangle of international interbank indebtedness that central banks and other authorities like the Financial Services Agency could not assess the potential consequences if it unravelled?
The answer, of course, is yes. But supposedly democratic parliaments, governments and monetary and financial authorities avoid explaining points like that to citizens in understandable words. Secrecy and deception about how the money system works, why it works as it does, and whether there might be a clear and simple way in which its workings could be reformed in the public interest, undoubtedly contributes to disillusionment with democratic politics and government.
Monetary reform would not be complicated. At present the Bank can only try to influence how much new money the banks create, by regulating interest rates. Monetary reform would make the central bank responsible for creating required additions to the money supply. We would simply be following the example of our 19th century predecessors, who recognised that banknotes were no longer just the "credit" notes they had once been, but had become money accepted by everyone for making payments. So they transferred from other banks to the Bank of England the function of issuing them. Similarly, everyone knows today that bank-account money has become real money, and is no longer just something called "credit".
Transferring the function of issuing bank-account money to the central bank would deprive the commercial banks of a nice little earner, and reduce the power they exercise over the economy and society as a whole. They would fight against it - no holds barred. That is a scary prospect for most practising politicians, government officials, City lawyers, economic academics and commentators, as well as bankers themselves and others professionally connected with money and banking. Until they see the "risk-to-reward ratio" for career survival and success shifting in favour of taking monetary reform seriously, they will keep their heads below the parapet.
So the challenge is for independent citizens outside the mainstream political, economic, and financial complex to start shifting that ratio from outside. We should begin by pressing the chancellor and others responsible for managing our money system to tell us, in words we will understand:
Where did the billions of money come from which fuelled the credit bonanza, subprime market and associated financial boom?
Broadly what proportion of that money was created out of thin air by commercial banks as loans to one another to invest in risky packages of already existing debts?
Did their ability to create it for that purpose make it more difficult for the authorities to assess the potential consequences of the tangle of international interbank indebtedness when it threatened to unravel?
Who are the people who have actually suffered from the banks having "lost" billions of pounds and dollars?
Where have those billions gone? Where are they now? Who got them, and what have they done with them? Have they "been laughing all the way to a bank" with them? Is their bank quietly laughing too?
Or have the lost billions simply disappeared into the thin air from which bankers originally created them?