The financial pandemonium that has set the world's markets flapping about like plump, tasty penguins in the wrong zoo enclosure has prompted the White House to fish the world's biggest chequebook out of its special emergency drawer.

President Bush, attempting to pass off the last dregs of his credibility as an almost drinkable shiraz, has left no brow unfurrowed in his efforts to deliver his bailout to the world. Seldom has one man looked so eager to embrace the welcoming rocking-chair of retirement.

The sums of money involved must boggle even the minds of top-level footballers. The Bugle has calculated that, with its $700 billion bailout bonanza, the US Treasury could afford to buy Cristiano Ronaldo off Manchester United, treble his current weekly wage and keep him chained to a radiator in a Wisconsin dungeon for the next 20,000 years. That is real money. (And attractive career stability for the Portuguese starlet. Contracts of that length are rare in modern sport.)

To the untrained head, the bailout seems to be the political equivalent of slaughtering a bull on a hastily constructed polystyrene altar, while looking skywards, and saying: “Well then, Zeus, how about it? Eh? Zeus? Could you get back to us on that one. ASAP.” The rest of us can merely duck for cover and hope any thunderbolts hit someone else.

The package is apparently based on the ancient economic proverb that if you throw enough money at a problem, some of it will stick. What it sticks to is a matter of no consequence - it is better for something to stick to something, than for nothing to stick to anything, according to those in the know.

On economic matters, The Bugle is very much out of the know. Nevertheless, we find the term “bailout” extremely worrying. Neither of its two principal senses should reassure the world over its increasingly anxious cornflakes.

A “bailout” seems destined to leave either a plane-load of passengers peering anxiously out of the window at its rapidly descending ex-pilot, speculating on how easy it is to land an aircraft without prior training; or a boat-load of passengers admiring the frantic intensity of the bucketwork, while wondering what is actually being done to plug the big hole in the hull. Both possibilities suggest an at-best uncomfortable journey ahead.

If the bailout is approved, bankrupt gamblers the world over will smile ruefully at the quirky inconsistencies of life. The current crisis appears to be the result of the World Economy essentially walking into a casino and placing the entire monetary wellbeing of the planet on red, while muttering to itself: “I've got a system, I've got a system.”

When you see a depressed old man stumbling out of a bookmaker, relighting half a rolled-up cigarette and wondering what his ex-wife is up to these days, at least you know it is his own money he has wasted, and at least the horse he blew it on actually existed. The divergent government reactions to these different forms of failed gambling proves once again that it is truly amazing what you can get away with if you are wearing a good-quality suit.

Party time

On a more positive note, The Bugle confidently expects the economic crisis to prove the saviour of Western democracy. It has opened up an exciting new front in British and American party politics - there is now a fierce battle between rival parties to be seen to be less partisan than their adversaries. There have been thinly veiled slurs on opponents' insufficient levels of non-partisanship, proud declarations that one person's political affiliation is less dogmatically affiliated than another's.

The Bugle predicts that our next general election will be won by the party that can prove to voters that it is most willing to abandon its own history, traditions and principles. To this end, it seems feasible that one major party will take the radical step of disbanding itself, to demonstrate quite how unpartisan it can be when the need arises. Given the nature of modern politics, other parties will then rush to terminate themselves in order not to be seen to be rowing an out-of-date bandwagon against the prevailing political tide.

We will thus be left with the independent, party-free political landscape of which all true democrats dream during their afternoon snoozes. And if it takes a cataclysmic global economic winter to give us a political system devoid of interminably scripted wittering and institutionalised juvenility, then that is a price worth paying.

Please help

The Bugle's fee for this column has been donated to The Economy. (If you would like to donate to The Economy, please visit a local retailer and buy an unnecessarily large quantity of something. According to the principles of trickle-up economics that apply in times of austerity, your spending could help to save the life of an endangered investment bank at an unspecified point in the future.)

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