So what can governments do to eliminate panic or turmoil in international markets? “Whatever we can”, according to Prime Minister Gordon Brown. “Not much”, according to ex-Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.

Brown and Greenspan may share many things, such as a disdain for small talk and soundbites, but listening to the two men is an illustration of the key differences between central bankers and politicians.

Brown’s presentation at Reuters today was a confident rattle through Labour economic policy in which the Prime Minister employed virtually every word and phrase of his standard vocabulary - stability, confidence, long-term commitment, flexibility, adaptability, raise our game, take no risks - to reassure his invited audience of senior business figures of his intention to manage the UK through the current international market turbulence.

Greenspan’s, however, was a softly-spoken and measured analysis of his 40 years’ experience as an economist and record four-term rule at the US Federal Reserve in which he scotched suggestions that you can do that much to eliminate turmoil.

His conclusion appeared to set him at odds with Brown’s assurances that the government would do what it could to offset the effect of turmoil.  Like it or not, he surmised, there’s little you can do about it.  So it’s impossible, then?

Greenspan warmed to his theme: troughs follow peaks as surely as night follows day. The current turmoil was an accident waiting to happen. If it hadn’t been the US sub-prime lending problems, some rupture elsewhere would have emerged to upset stability in the international financial markets.

If Brown or his Chancellor, Alistair Darling, were perturbed by this assessment of an apparent mission impossible, neither showed it. Darling was on his feet even before Greenspan had departed the podium. He thanked the ex-Federal Reserve chairman profusely for his insights and then promptly explained exactly what the UK government now plans to do to tackle the current market turbulence and its impact on consumers, savers and investors here and elsewhere.

Measures include some widely trailed changes to the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, a proposed beefing-up of banking regulations to focus on liquidity as well as solvency and a much stronger role for the IMF. He even appeared to hint that EU legislation governing how Central Banks operate as lenders of last resort might need to be clarified - perhaps to enable them to do this covertly, mused some of the audience afterwards.  

Greenspan may believe governments can’t prevent turmoil but it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop Darling and Brown trying. And if the UK government is also simultaneously going to try and amend or ‘clarify’ EU banking legislation to help them do it, it might not be the International Monetary Fund they need but the Impossible Missions Force and its key operative Mr Nathan Hunt.

High inflation these days tends to be something most people read about in the newspaper rather than experience directly themselves, but if predictions from Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, turn out to be correct, we could soon see an end to the benign inflationary times that we’ve seen over the last twenty years.

Homeowners struggling under the weight of a huge mortgage might welcome a hefty dose of inflation if it eats away at the real cost of their home loans but pensioners struggling to get by on fixed pension payouts won’t be so grateful.

Successive governments saw the reduction of inflation as their number one priority in the 1980s and 1990s but, according to Greenspan, economies are increasingly in the grip of forces that central banks and governments may be able to do little about.

So does the prospect of inflation worry you? Or is Greenspan’s assertion that the prospect of recession is ’still less than 50:50′ of more pressing concern - did you think its chances were even that high? And what of Gordon Brown’s reputation - did he get out of the Treasury just in time or will he still have to shoulder his share of responsibility for whatever lies ahead? Tell us what you think, we’d like to hear your views.

Columnist James Saft argues elsewhere on Reuters that the buy-to-let market in the UK is our version of the US sub-prime catastrophe and that the Northern Rock debacle will prove to be the needle that pops the bubble.

Is such an alarmist view justified? Anyone trawling property Web sites for a house or flat in the UK will surely have noticed that affordable entry-level homes remain as difficult to find as ever. Even if property prices stagnate, most buy-to-let investors will have enjoyed hefty rises over the past few years, which means only those who got in way too late — perhaps only in the past few months after interest rates began going up — may be caught by the squeeze between low-to-zero capital gains and rising mortgage costs.  

Saft also acknowledges there could be few forced sellers because unemployment and interest rates both remain low, unlike the position of the late 1980s when the housing market crashed. But even if there were more forced sellers, would it really spark a serious downturn in the market?

The experts have been telling us for ages that the reason values stayed resolutely high is that there is a drastic shortage of affordable property. It’s a basic law of supply and demand, driven not so much by the number of buy-to-let investors out there but by a national failure over many years to build enough new houses. Surely you’d need really drastic numbers of buy-to-let investors, far more than there are today, to cause such severe shortages in affordable housing?

So what now? Even if the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors says there’s a 10 percent chance of a housing crash in the UK, that’s still a 90 percent chance that there won’t be one. If you own a house, or are thinking of buying one, which way will you be betting? We’re keen to hear what you think.

A BBC newsreader, Huw Edwards, described the UK bank at the heart of the current liquidity crisis as “Northern Wreck” yesterday. An inadvertent slip of the tongue, perhaps, but a view that tallies with other commentators who point out that the bank’s difficulties were evident long before it actually came off the rails. Shouldn’t the government also have forseen these problems, and acted earlier?

Alistair Darling may have seen off a collapse in consumer confidence for now by guaranteeing savers’ deposits, but many of Northern Rock’s customers want to know why it took the sight of thousands of them queueing in high streets up and down the country before there was any attempt to shore up confidence and intervene.

Northern Rock itself put out a profit warning at the end of June and, as international money markets dried up, saw a further run on its shares as investors rightly predicted it wouldn’t hit its revamped profit targets for the year. There was then a hunt for prospective buyers as the situation worsened and bank directors realised they had a major problem on their hands — yet the Bank of England still refused to consider propping the bank up.  

So whose fault is it? The regulator’s? The Bank of England’s? Or the government’s? Opposition politicians are pointing their fingers at the Chancellor — but is that fair? Or is all this turmoil one of those cyclical things that we’d forgotten about when times were good?

So how worried should we be by liquidity problems at Northern Rock and the Bank of England’s decision to step in as lender of last resort? While there’s no doubt that the central bank’s move is highly significant, Northern Rock itself isn’t about to go bust. Its profit warning today says it will still make between 500 and 540 million pounds profit this year, but obviously this is a lot less than the 647 million pounds previously forecast.

The shares, though, have taken a huge hit - already down 50 percent this year, they’re another 20 percent off today and City investors will be scurrying around trying to work out which other financial institutions are likely to be going cap in hand to the Bank of England.

The Chancellor, Alistair Darling, took to the airwaves this morning to talk down the prospects of wider problems, pointing out that the British economy had been growing robustly over the last 10 years and that the Bank of England’s action will help ensure stability in both the economy and the banking system.

But will his words have the desired effect? Borrowers looking for home loans to buy property may feel somewhat spooked by Northern Rock’s difficulties and hold off buying. Could this impact the housing market? If you’re a borrower, homeowner or just a concerned consumer, we’d like to hear your views. How worried are you?

When Madeleine McCann disappeared in Portugal on the evening of May 3, her parents pursued every possible opportunity to raise public awareness. Kate and Gerry McCann proved to be highly savvy media operators as they pulled out all the stops and achieved unprecedented worldwide publicity for their daughter.

But as the days turned to weeks and months with few outward signs of progress in the police investigation, the initially sympathetic hearing that the McCanns received in the media waned. Rumours began and persisted, countered initially by claims from the McCanns supporters, that the Portuguese didnt like this constant reminder that a little girl had disappeared in their midst.

There was even criticism that the McCanns appeared to revel in all the publicity that theyd generated. And, finally there were leaks, apparently from the police but, actually, very little of it from named sources, that evidence pointed to the parents themselves being somehow complicit in Madeleines disappearance.

Now, with both parents named as official suspects in the case, the newspapers and news bulletins are full of details as to the supposed nature of the supposed evidence against them, lots of it from apparently unnamed sources.

The McCanns, meanwhile, are back in the UK but besieged by a media army outside the front door of their Leicestershire home while they await developments.

Whatever hopes the McCanns might have had for some privacy for their two other children now look rather forlorn, dashed at least in part by the ongoing tide of speculation in the press as to whether UK social services might step in, whatever that means.

However this desperate case turns out, the McCann family will now never shake off the media interest in their lives. Even if Madeleine were to turn up fit and well, a prurient interest in her and her family would doubtless persist into her adulthood. And if she is never seen again, her parents will always have the stain of responsibility on their names, irrespective of whether any of the evidence discovered proves relevant or not.

We all accept that the media has a responsibility to report the goings on in this case. But is there a line that has been crossed? While the media displayed its best traits in publicising Madeleine McCanns disappearance, is it now showing a familiar dark side? Or is all this coverage, as some would say, no more than completely reasonable in the circumstances?

Smoking in public places will become illegal throughout the UK on Sunday morning in a move that could finally herald a sea-change in public attitudes towards tobacco and persuade more people to give up tobacco.
The evidence from Scotland, where smoking in public places has been banned since last year, and Wales, which brought in similar restrictions in April, is that more people are likely to give up if it is made much harder for them to smoke when they’re out and about in public.
And although pub landlords and brewers warn of dire financial consequences for their businesses, the experience of New York, where smoking in bars and other public places was outlawed in 2003, suggests this is unlikely to be the case.

(Have a look at our special coverage page on the smoking ban). For those who do manage to kick the habit, the air they breathe will be cleaner, their health should improve and those who give up could also make a significant financial saving as a result of not having to fork out some 550p for a packet of twenty cigarettes.
That’s the theory, anyway. What do you think? Should smoking be banned? Will it really make any difference to the British way of life? Or will it just be another knee-jerk measure from the nanny state which will have little effect one way or the other?

Tony Blair came to the Reuters HQ in London’s Canary Wharf to vent his spleen on the media and finally tell it how it is. His speech, billed as being about public life and leadership in the media age, turned out to be a 35 minute blood letting as he savaged the modern 24 hour news media as a ‘feral beast’ which just wants to tear people in public life apart.

He did pause to admit some responsibility, acknowledging that New Labour had assiduously courted the media and spent rather too much time worrying about what the papers said.

But the overall theme of his presentation was one of damnation. The press was ruining people’s lives, trampling over their personal affairs and making many think twice about the wisdom of engaging in public life.

As a Reuters journalist I hesitate to wade in with an opinion. In a previous incarnation at Associated Newspapers, home of the Daily Mail, I would not have been so reluctant. Indeed, it would have been expected.

Today’s Independent newspaper, a title named by Blair as a particular example of how views and comment now masquerade as news, has - predictably - hit back, with a front page opinion piece about the speech.

What’s your view? Are we all feral beasts? Is Blair to blame as much as the media? Does Britain, indeed the world, have the media it deserves? Or, as Blair suggests, is some new form of regulation really what is now needed?

For those who’ve covered developments in Northern Ireland over the past few years, the prospect of hardline Protestant cleric Ian Paisley and Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness sitting side by side and even cracking jokes together must once have seemed about as likely as Elvis being found alive or - as a UK tabloid newspaper once claimed - a Second World War bomber being discovered on the moon.  

Does the sight of these two one-time arch-foes making political progress together, as former enemies have also done in South Africa, give any hope for similar developments in other world trouble spots? Who are the other former sworn enemies most likely to follow suit?

The latest front cover of satirical magazine Private Eye depicts Tony Blair peering through a magnifying glass and exclaiming, “Oh look - it’s my legacy!”

After a decade of a Labour Government, how will you remember Tony Blair’s premiership?

Will it - as the critics say - be Iraq, WMDs, dodgy dossiers and spin?

Or will it actually be ‘education, education, education’? Or, perhaps, for the improvements Labour say that they have made to public services up and down the country?

Whatever your views, have your say and tell us what you think Blair’s legacy really will be.