Well, another week on and I still can't work out if this credit crunch thing has actually started yet or not. Yes, some car manufacturers have cancelled some overtime shifts - but that's not what we think of as A Depression, is it? That's just car factory stuff, a rota adjustment. It's scarcely the 9/11 of overdrafts. Everyone's bottom line is that we won't consider the bad times have really started until there's a line of shabbily dressed hobos stretching down our street, banging their tin soup-bowls with wooden spoons, and singing Down and Out from Bugsy Malone.

But while we await the Official Start of The End of All Good Times Day, one thing has come to my attention: as the world's leaders join in urgent, unprecedentedly collaborative talks on how best to shore up our teetering banks and fend off the looming Cashpocalypse, a vital thing has been overlooked. Yes, that's right, absolutely no one, as yet, has begun hurling accusations around as to whose fault this all is. Totally no time at all has been devoted to carping, cavilling, mudslinging, wild misrepresentations of accepted historical fact or desperate buck-passing to bewildered but ultimately expendable subordinates!

Given this glaring oversight, then - which, given our track record, is a fearful abnegation of a vital part of our humanity - I'd like to be the first to point a shaky finger and say: “J'accuse, erm, Dépression ...” (Argh, maybe I should have done this in English.)

Carol Vorderman As Britain's greatest mathematician of the past 400 years, surely Vorderman should have realised that the figures weren't adding up. As early as 1998, by some reckonings, someone with a mind as dazzling and incisive as hers should have been able to punch holes through the balance sheets of dozens of operations in the City, and sound an alarm to investors worldwide. Alas, she was too busy juicing beetroots, having colonics and crying over Richard Whiteley to do anything about it. And, now that I think of it, doing adverts for credit companies. Now we're all going to have to live in cardboard boxes and sell our children for fuel. Thanks, Vorderman; some “The People's Number-Cruncher of Hearts” you turned out to be.

Men Don't get me wrong, I like men. And unlike W.C. Fields's quote about children, I could probably eat a whole one. But let's face it: put hundreds of men in a high-rise building from 6am to 7pm, Monday to Friday, with a working day that starts with someone clanging a huge bell, to play what is, essentially, billion-dollar poker, and what are you going to get? Testosterone-addled insanity. Trillion-dollar deficits. A whole heap of credit doo-doo. We need more women in the City, particularly battle-weary mothers. Given their experience, they would have realised early on that the concept of “short selling” was, in fact, a totally imaginary friend, and acted accordingly.

Women We always get the blame in the end. The Daily Mail* is no doubt compiling a 12-page special explaining how our unreasonable desires for shoes, babies, Colin Firth and equal representation in the halls of legislature has plunged the entire world - plus the Universe, and planets we have not yet discovered - into a terminal and eventually fatal financial decline. And if it's not the Mail blaming us, we'll just do it ourselves. Deep down, we all know that if we'd lost that extra stone, none of this would have happened.

Margaret Thatcher No real factsor documentary evidence here. My working knowledge of international credit systems is up there with my knowledge of how bats feel when they fly over gravel. But it all feels kind of Thatcher-y, doesn't it? Unregulated free trade; greedy men in suits; working classes bearing the brunt of it; people wearing shoulderpads in a non-ironic manner again. Even Bucks Fizz have reformed. It may have taken 20 years to come to fruition, but this must be the work of Thatcher.

The News Let's have a little look round and see who's benefiting the most from this “will we/won't we see the end of civilisation by November?” malarkey. Yes, it's The News, which is having a whale of a time with the oddly erotic prospect of everyone being doomed. Dramatic votes in the Senate; emergency meetings in Europe; the BBC's business editor saying “trillions of dollars have disappeared overnight!” - it's making great telly. To the point where one is tempted to conclude that The Media conspired to bring about the whole event, maybe faking a credit crunch via rigged phone-votes on Richard & Judy. Special props to The Times, for the black-and-white shot last week of storm clouds gathering over the White House. This was a picture that simultaneously used acute visual shorthand to convey the credit crisis and also gave the impression that a tornado was coming, which would soon whisk everyone away to Oz, to meet Glinda and the Lollipop Guild.

Manufacturers of white rice, white bread and sundry potato-based items Come on. We, “the people”, knew we couldn't really live in a world with 110 per cent mortgages, infinite stock market growth and free-to-view “webisodes” of Primeval. We knew that it was totally unsustain-able. So why did we conspire in this ruinous charade? Apart from tbeing, as a species, inherently over-optimistic deludos? Because we were all too full and sleepy after our din-dins to care, that's why. For decades, sundry home secretaries and drug czars have been seeking the source of Britain's entropy in the wrong direction. It is not heroin or crack that we should be worrying about, but starch. Carbohydrates are the opiate of the masses. As a nation we were too smacked out on gigantic plates of buttery spuds, bread-and-butter pudding and macaroni cheese to delve into the whys and wherefores of the international banking system. And now we're all financially dead. Thanks, McCain Oven Chips, Tesco own-brand fusilli and Uncle Ben's rice. Thanks for making the instrument of our downfall so fatally delicious.
*Or Daily MALE VOICE OF OPPRESSION, as I rather cleverly like to refer to it.

caitlin.moran@thetimes.co.uk

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