Chancellor Darling has announced that he will provide a Treasury guarantee for all deposits in every bank up to £100,000. This followed his temporary guarantee of every single penny of Northern Rock's deposits, after the first run on a bank since 1866, threatened to cause a stampede across the system.

The stampede was, of course, thus averted. Which is all very well. But in the event of a real banking meltdown, there is no way that the Treasury would be able to guarantee even a tiny proportion of the deposits which would be affected.

Of course, Darling has hinted that there will be a levy on banks to create some kind of future rescue 'insurance'. Obviously, he understands that he will not be very popular if he asks taxpayers to fork out for bank failures! But whether this is viable proposition is another matter. Especially when one recalls the difficulties that the government had when trying to set up the Pension Protection Scheme levies on private companies.

Anyway, for the time being Darling's attempts to rebuild confidence may have worked, but this is still just paper talk.

In the meantime others have gone for the scalp of Mervyn King, Bank of England governor - who is accused of not acting in time to shore up the dodgy Northern Rock.

King is criticised for making a stand (unlike the European Central Bank) against providing a life line for banks which engage in risky practices to finance their lending. However it turns out that he really had no scruples in this regard. His problem, he said, was that he was not able to act in secret!

Anyway, now the debate on what went wrong hinges on the faults in the regulatory bodies. Nothing wrong with the "fundamentals" of the system itself! Indeed, the government is perfectly happy to "guarantee" this totally insane system which is more and more built on the sand of financial speculation, using mechanisms which operate exactly like a casino!

Yes, a casino in which a few thousand in the City make millions each month. These are the people who are really threatening the system with meltdown, not poor people who cannot afford to pay their mortgages in the US!

Clamping down on them and their ever more extravagant gambling is not on this government's agenda. But even if it would not make the system any more just, surely that is the very least which should be done?