Who knows? Probably an awful lot! Thousands and thousands of pounds, each and every one of us!
Credit Crunch ha - more like monetary Free-Fall !
The British Government CANNOT itself buy out or bail out banks. The Government has NO MONEY! The British Government only has OUR money! If they persist in trying to save them, they will be doing so in our name, and we will pay, and pay and pay and pay and pay and........!
The financial gamblers of the money markets and their institutions should sink or swim on their own. They chose to dive in to this sea of debt, nobody forced them to!
The Bank of England is still a privately owned bank. It was bought out by the (broke) British Government after WW2 using borrowed money. Borrowed from whom? We do not know, but we can guess can't we! ( three Rs - Royals, Rothchildes, Rockefellers, etc. perhaps) The British people have been paying them back with interest ever since.
Whoever they are, they are very powerful and don't just pull the British Government's strings - they yank its chain! The Federal Reserve in the USA is also privately owned by the same bunch! They are yanking that chain too. And they are behind all the European banks, and the EU, yanking away!
If you want to try to understand what is going on and why, financially in the UK - and the world, you are not going to find out from the TV or British radio. A good place to start however, is this website,
This short film might help too:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw32XCw_AvM
www.ukcolumn.org/2008/09/25/wizards-and-fairies-in-kabuki-land