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The UK economy is like every fleet manager's least favourite driver - far too fond of the accelerator pedal, apt to become overheated and persistently deaf to pleas to moderate its expenses.
Worst of all, the longer it goes without having a crash, the nastier and more costly you can bet that the eventual wreck will turn out to be.
UK Fleet Manager Gordon Brown recently took the inevitable phone call from the City: "Sorry Boss, we've parked your economy upside down in a ditch again." Now Assistant Fleet Manager Alistair Darling says he's looking at shelling out half a trillion pounds just to put the thing back on its wheels in the hope it can be fixed.
Half a trillion pounds, if you prefer to think in pictures, is a stack of £20 notes fifteen and a half thousand miles high. That's not wrong. It's a very big number - around £17,000 for every one of the UK's millions of taxpayers. Fourteen thousand miles of those twenties are in the form of guarantees for money the Government is borrowing to lend on to the banks. Assuming that the economy isn't a total write off, the public cost will be much smaller and will be felt through long-term cuts in services and higher interest rates rather than a direct raid on our pockets.
That still leaves up to £50 billion (or 16,000 suitcases filled with £20 notes) of taxpayer's money to be invested directly in our wobbly high street banking system. As the BBC's Paul Mason pointed out on BBC TV's Newsnight, that was enough, on the day of the bailout, to buy HBOS outright nine times over.
Gordon Brown needs to refill the banking system's fuel tank because his erstwhile friends on Wall Street and the City, convinced themselves that they'd invented perpetual motion. Western banks borrowed from Chinese savers in order to lend money to Western consumers to buy stuff made by Chinese savers, thereby returning some of the money to the Chinese savers for another roll of the barrel.
On an infinite planet with zero cost of energy, perpetual motion might be possible. In the real world it isn't. With the not-so-magical money machine constantly threatening to run out of steam, the banks greased the wheels and weighted the odds by repackaging debt into huge quantities of fictitious capital on the one hand while desperately trying to keep the lending side going with ever cheaper and easier credit on the other.
By the time this doomed charade reached its tipping point with US sub-prime and UK buy-to-let mortgages, the only qualification needed for getting a loan anywhere from Monterey to Morecambe Bay was to have a discernible pulse. Willingness and ability to pay back the money were optional. By the beginning of 2008, the UK's saving ratio (the ratio between what households spend and what they put aside for a rainy day) had followed the US model and turned negative.
Like a driver belting along on a hot day with all his car's windows open and the air conditioning going full blast, the banks let cash drain out of deposits while still gaily making loans and paying individuals bonuses as big as entire fleet budgets. Then they realised that they were broke. Then - a far worse realisation for any bank - they realised that all the other banks were broke too. Crash!
Now we are all savers, whether we want to be or not, as the bursting bubble forces all sides to repair their balance sheets - not necessarily with their own money. Of course, no-one except the banks is happy that they get first dibs at the colossal amount of public money that will be needed to get the economy rolling again.
The flood of our money into City vaults should at least hold at bay the spectre of a 1930s-style depression, when thousands of otherwise sound businesses failed because banks wouldn't provide day-to-day credit. Even so, phrases such as 'hard landing' and 'L-shaped recession' will soon cease to be of merely academic interest to ivory tower economists.
When it's all over, one hopes that whoever is in power will haul in the heads of the finance industry, including our asleep-at-the-wheel regulators, for a stiff talk about duty of care and responsible lending.
They say that ending the crisis is simply a question of trust and confidence. But, like an overconfident driver to whom you reluctantly return a car after yet another crunch, it will be a long time before we know whether lessons have really been learned.
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