AndrewJ - great link to the UK Telegraph. Whilst there I had a nosey around some of the other articles in the Finance section. Wow, things are ugly in the UK. The articles themselves are ugly enough, but the readers' comments afterwards are even worse. There appears to be liittle to no optimism there.

"Meanwhile, the Bank confirmed a start date of April 1, 2010, for the new prudential liquidity policy that should reduce banks' over-reliance in the past on short term wholesale funding. The policy was to have come in before the end of this year.
Banks would initially be required to hold minimum core funding ratio set initially at 65 percent, moving in two stages to as high as 75 percent on a timetable yet to be determined, but which should be complete by mid-2012, the RBNZ says"
So the banks must have told Alan..".hold on mate, we aint starting no prudential stuff until April at the earliest" and guess what....the start date has move out. What's the bet the 65% and 75% targets will be chopped down and also placed on the never never list. One massive fat joke.

What are they going to lift, before the days of electronic credit and the electronic transfer system runs on the bank were when people rushed to convert what was recorded as money into what was recognised as physical money, i.e. receipt deposits for gold, on call deposit accounts for cash. I ask just what you are going to rush to the bank to convert whats on your bank statement into, it cant be cash, because unless you are very quick to get the 3% of our money supply that anylonger exists in notes and coin you will miss out. Thus can someone of higher intelligence please tell me just what it is they are going to increase when they say lifting capital adequacy requirements, I tell you what I think it means, they are going to tell those that plundered the system not to lone excessive created credit forward in comparision to the available natural resources who's future utilisation is the only thing that currently backs the monetary system, and like those who have committed the previous great crimes against wider humanity, it looks like they are going to get to keep the booty and their dictatorship by economic domination.