Bankers, politicians and regulators have taken their share of the blame for the credit crisis.

Gary Jenkins, Head of Fixed Income Research at Evolution Securities, polled about 200 investors for a more specific view on who was at fault.

Alan Greenspan, former head of the U.S. Federal Reserve, was the most popular choice, with more than a third of the votes. Other more unusual picks included the BBC’s business correspondent Robert Peston and property TV show host Sarah Beeny.

If you could pick somone to blame who would it be?

Britain could begin a telling exercise in classical monetary theory on Thursday as the central bank gets set to test a newly minted policy of “quantitative easing”.

In an effort to pump more money into the financial system and encourage banks to get lending again, the Bank of England has been given the green light to basically create more money.

 It will use the electronic funds to buy short- and long-dated gilts and a host of commercial debt in the hope that that will free up other capital to the banks, allowing them to lend more.

At root, the exercise is based on MV=PT, known as the Fisher equation of exchange and a mainstay of Keynesian monetary theory.

In the equation, M is the quantity of money and V is the velocity at which it travels around the economy. P stands for the general level of prices and T equals the number of transactions performed over a given accounting period.

In theory, V and T are more or less stable, meaning that all other things being equal, the amount of money in circulation has a direct impact on prices and/or the number of transactions.

By pumping more M into the economy (or at least making more M available), the central bank is hoping that economic activity will pick up (T will increase) and the economy will be reflated (P will pick up). In theory.

The problem will come if those who have more money made available to them — the banks, commercial borrowers, companies and ultimately individuals — end up sitting on it rather than using it. That would effectively mean that V falls.

That has always been the unquantifiable in monetary theory as precisely measuring the velocity of money is extremely difficult, not to say open to interpretation.

If it works, quantitative easing will push up M, P and T and a corner may be turned in the credit crisis. Maybe. If it doesn’t, then M may go up, but V, T and P will all go on falling, causing More Very Tricky Problems indeed.

An old Chinese proverb states that it is better to take many small steps in the right direction than make a giant leap and fall back. Judging by the number of bank lending initiatives announced over the past three months, British policymakers are taking this to heart.

On Monday, Britain announced no fewer than eight measures to kickstart lending in its credit-starved economy. Despite pouring 37 billion pounds of public money into major banks last October and pledging hundreds of billions more in guarantees, the government had to admit it needed to take more credit risk off banks' books.

Monday's package is designed to be comprehensive.  It includes -- amongst other things -- a fund to allow the Bank of England to lend directly to businesses, a framework for boosting the money supply if needed, a guarantee scheme for asset-backed securities and the offer of insurance against potentially explosive losses.

None is a silver bullet and the devil will be in the detail. Much of the nitty-gritty of how these measures will work is still not known. 

 It is also likely to be a slow process. The Bank of England's 50 billion pound asset-buying pot is one of the few measures to take effect immediately.  Analysts at BNP Paribas calculate this equates to just 2 percent of bank lending in Britain compared to a ten percentage point drop in lending in the last year.

One opposition politician, Vince Cable, likened attempts to kickstart bank lending in Britain to "giving a kiss of life to a corpse." Colourful. But a revival in bank lending is indeed by no means assured. More steps may yet be needed.

A small but growing number of companies are considering asking their workers to take a pay cut as a means of cutting costs without having to fire anyone.

In the latest example, three unions representing steelworkers at Corus have offered to take a 10 percent cut across the company’s entire UK workforce of 25,000 for six months in an attempt to save one of the last remaining steel factories in Britain — the plant at Llanwern in Newport, South Wales.

The steelmaking part of Llanwern was shut in 2001 with 1,300 redundancies but the site still makes steel sheets and employs more than 1,000 people.

India’s Tata Group, which bought the Anglo-Dutch company last year, has said it wants to cut costs by 350 million pounds in both the UK and the Netherlands as it cuts production by 30 percent.

Other possible solutions include cutting employees’ working hours. Corus in the Netherlands, for example, is asking 6,400 workers to each work one day less perweek for six weeks — the equivalent of cutting 1,100 full-time jobs.

In another example, engineering firm JCB has managed to limit job losses after the GMB union agreed to accept a shorter and lower-paid working week

As the downturn bites and announcements of  huge job losses become a daily event, do you think such solutions are the answer. Would you take a pay cut? Or is there an element here of employers using the dire economic situation to extract unfair concessions from their workforces?

In these hard times, those whose job it is to part us from our money in the shops are beginning to describe the retailing experience as a family activity, a way of relaxing — absolutely nothing to do with conspicuous consumption, you understand.

The word “luxury”, we are told, sends the wrong message nowadays and is being quietly phased out of promotional material. Bling is over.

Rory Sutherland of advertising agency Ogilvy even predicts there will be a trend towards the modest lifestyles reputedly favoured by Lutherans and Swedes.

What do you think? Do you believe the credit crisis will have any lasting impact on people’s attitudes when it comes to the relentless pursuit of material gain?

Or will we be back melting plastic in the shops as soon as the “all clear” siren is sounded?

Bank of England Governor Mervyn King has made his first public speech since the emergency bank recapitalisation programme and several newspapers commented on the change in demeanour of a man who once said his ambition as a central banker was to be boring.

The dramatic events over the past two months since the collapse of Lehman brothers have forced King into the spotlight — like it or not. Being boring is not an option now.

Speaking to businessmen in Leeds, King said the economy is probably entering its first recession in 16 years and that the outlook has not worsened as rapidly as it has in the past month for a very long time.

He called the financial crisis an “extraordinary, almost unimaginable, sequence of events” and added: “We now face a long, slow haul to restore lending to the real economy, and hence growth of our economy to more normal conditions.”

The Daily Telegraph was impressed by the language. “Mervyn King certainly wasn’t pulling his punches in Leeds last night,” it said, adding that the chances of a “quickie” recession are slim.

The Guardian said markets may well interpret his speech as further support for the idea that interest rates could go below 4 percent.

“Why? Well one way to encourage money to flow around the system is to make its price cheaper,” the paper noted. “King, the man accused of being overly concerned about ‘moral hazard’ , suddenly sounds like an arch-pragmatist.”

The Independent called his speech characteristically eloquent but took the opportunity to criticise the bank recapitalisation scheme, of which, it said, King is an admirer, accusing it of being heavy-handed.

“In forcing the banks into much more dramatic capital-raising plans than anyone other than banking supervisors think necessary, the government has ridden roughshod over shareholder rights in a way that doesn’t bode well for the future of the UK economy,” it said.

No one else, the paper said, had followed the Treasury blueprint of part-nationalisation.

“Ignoring  property rights sends out a very bad message indeed about a country’s attractions as a place to do finance and business,” it added.

“The government’s overkill may well have saved the banking system from collapse but it has also helped to destroy confidence in the stock market.”

The Times, however, used the Leeds speech to attack King.

“Mr King’s tenure at Threadneedle Street has been far from boring. It has, however been inconspicuous — and that is an indictment of Mr King’s performance,” it said.

“In the credit crisis of 2007-08, Mr King has been hesitant where he has even been visible. His belated attempts at expounding the Bank’s role, notably in the rescue of Northern Rock, have conveyed querulousness at the perfomance of the government more than calmness in a near-perfect financial storm.”

It praised King for being early and right in realising that the UK’s deposit insurance scheme was inadequate to the scale of the banking crisis implied by Northern Rock’s failure.

“Yet the message during Mr King’s period of office has been too Delphic and muted,” it added. “In the bull market of the late 1990s, Alan Greenspan spoke of “irrational exuberance”. No such telling phrase has crossed the lips of Mr King. What we have learnt is that being boring is no excuse for being invisible. “

Sorry seems to be the hardest word in many walks of life - but for hard-nosed bosses  of financial institutions it seems to be even tougher, even during the credit crunch.

A recent notable exception was Richard Fuld, CEO of collapsed Lehman Brothers, who told U.S. lawmakers earlier this month he took full responsibility for his actions and felt “horrible about what has happened to the company,” but insisted he shared the blame with regulators and Congress.

Maybe actual apologies are thin on the ground because our world has become so complex that there is never one single person responsible for the collapse of a bank or  the failure of a company.

Do you think an apology can make a difference? And who should apologise - the bosses, the regulators or all those who promised that investing in the stockmarket would return pots of gold for investors?