That’ll teach me to write ahead of events! My last blog post was written just two hours before the US House of Representatives voted on the proposed $700 billion ‘financial rescue’ or ‘bail-out’ (delete as applicable) of the banking system.

Like many, I expected the politicians to nod it through, despite the huge misgivings of average Americans who saw it as the unwarranted rescue of a lot of irresponsible Wall Street fat cats. As pundits predicted, the vote did indeed prove historic - but not for the reasons they’d anticipated.

I got back home just in time to watch the news unfold on the evening news. Live interviews with traders and bankers on the floor of the NYSE gave a sense of the drama unfolding in front of them. And pundit after pundit queued up to make the same point - that US lawmakers decided to heed the views of their constituents. With elections just five weeks away, the turkeys had finally decided not to vote for Christmas. I’m paraphrasing, of course.

But I’d like to think that the essence of my post yesterday remains true - we still have no real idea how far this crisis has to run and until we sense even the faintest prospect of a recovery (anyone remember Norman Lamont’s Green Shoots of Recovery?) things will remain both uncertain and volatile. Despite all the fear and uncertainty, however, it’s good to see that some things don’t change.

Switching rapidly between channels, I caught the dramatic, live interviews that the BBC and Channel 4 carried from Wall Street and Capitol Hill, their correspondents ad libbing furiously as events moved even as they spoke. Elsewhere, however, it was business as usual. The briefest of headlines about the unexpected outcome of the vote before the presenter moved on to the serious news of the day - Britney Spears has a new album out. And Natasha Kaplinsky has had a baby, apparently. For viewers it was, perhaps, a reassuring end to a chaotic day.