The developed world's latest theory of economic management - try anything until something works - is having odd outcomes. America frets over the onward march of socialism on Wall Street. Thrifty Germany throws fiscal caution to the winds. Commu-nist China's Prime Minister talks like J P Morgan. And staunch conservatives, whether David Cameron or Nicolas Sarkozy, wonder aloud whether this capitalism business is all it was cracked up to be.
In Britain, the land where Lewis Carroll got his break, the answer to embarrassing private-sector excess turns out to be a cunning plan - now, why did no-one think of this before? - to spare the Post Office the embrace of the private sector. This counts as revolutionary.
Amazingly, it turns out that we had the makings of an honest, ordinary, untainted banking system all along. Twelve thousand branches, mortgages, credit cards, savings, personal loans, plus a benefits and pensions service for 4.3 million people: to a limited extent, someone really did think of it before.
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True, prior to the private sector's attempt to impersonate Monty Python's Mr Creosote (he guzzles until he explodes), New Labour was not much excited by the Post Office. The big idea, even when glamorous proper banks were being overwhelmed by the rules of addition, subtraction and multiplication, was to shut down as many "uneconomic" (cf Northern Rock, RBS et al) branches as possible.
Meanwhile, the Post Office Ltd's parent company, Royal Mail, would be part-privatised. Because that's what New Labour does. Because it always works. And because services always improve afterwards.
A great many Labour MPs, more than 100 of them, do not care for this plan, it is true. Simultaneously, commercial banks have decided they do not feel able to lend as once they did. So ministers face the possibility of a hugely damaging party rebellion while the banking system succumbs to sclerosis as recession turns to depression. Clearly, this calls for the finest minds in government.
Thinks: we had the People's Princess, the People's Dome, the People's Peers. Got it! The People's Bank. It won't even be a total fib, for once. This will involve lots of the People's Money, after all.
Let's stick with the Post Office. Lord Mandelson, for one, is "warm" to the idea of greatly expanding its role. People around the Business Secretary are working on the scheme, we are assured, and the Commons Business and Enterprise Select Committee has been asked to provide an opinion. In prospect is an entire publicly owned alternative banking sector. If you believe all you read, that is.
The first sceptical question has been doing the rounds for weeks and months. Don't we, taxpayers and government, already own banks? If it is now necessary to conscript the Post Office network for the sake of social responsibility and a fiscal stimulus, does that not imply the failure of those multi-billion pound bailouts for the private sector? They have been rescued, they have their guarantees, their insurances, their open-ended Treasury backing. They cannot go on blaming the flight of foreign banks forever. Why is the Bank of Mandelson necessary?
The artful leaks suggest, in any case, that a reconfigured Post Office network would offer full-spectrum banking. From business services to debit cards to financial advice, it would act like any other bank. Which is to say that it would, necessarily, compete with every other bank. Which means, surely, that it would be in competition with each of the ailing banks taxpayers have subsidised and/or own. So the government competes with itself? That doesn't sound quite right.
I certainly doubt that it will sound right to the new bosses at RBS, or the people who are being paid extravagantly well to steer Northern Rock back to the real world. Equally, Gordon Brown and Lord Mandelson have surrounded themselves with distinguished old lags from the commercial financial sector - it takes one to know one, and so forth - for aid and advice during this crisis. Will they not recoil, instinctively, at the idea of a fully functioning state bank?
Stranger things have happened. Stranger things are happening. State intervention, the sane idea of last resort, has been rehabilitated across the world. What is not yet clear, however, is the extent, if any, to which the proposal for a reborn Post Office is related to the fashion- able idea of a "bad bank". Such a thing - purchasing toxic assets and placing them in a kind of quarantine - may yet be unavoidable. I wouldn't advertise the possibility to "the people", however.
There is another complication. The Post Office's existing services offering credit cards, loans and mortgages have been provided, since 2004, through a deal with the Bank of Ireland. The republic, as you may have heard, is in a jam even bigger than the one squeezing Britain. Its government lives in fear of the international credit rating agencies. It is struggling to hold its economy and its banking sector together.
So how would a People's/Post Bank accommodate the Bank of Ireland arrangement? No disrespect, but, knowing what we know now, would we invite an Icelandic bank to perform such a role? Or is there even the faintest possibility that a British state enterprise might wind up subsidising an Irish bank?
The Treasury has thought of that, no doubt. I wonder if the civil servants and the government have also thought through the logic behind the demands, from small businesses, customers and MPs alike, for comprehensive Post Office banking. It is not merely because the commercial banks are crocked. It is not merely because trust in those enterprises has dissipated, probably for a generation. The impetus comes from a palpable desire to redefine banking in terms of social utility and social need. And honesty.
Yet if that is the case, the plan to part-privatise Royal Mail itself should also fall. Why go ahead with flogging even 35% (down from a proposed 49%), probably to the Dutch firm TNT, when the inevitable result will be a contraction in "uneconomic" services? The government may be incapable of grasping why small post offices matter to the identity and survival of communities. But seriously: would part-privatisation to foreign interests, plus branch closures, plus the Irish deal, convey a reassuring message to the customers paying to establish a new bank?
Sort that lot out, nevertheless, and Lord Mandelson might be on to something. A state bank would be inundated, in fact, with customers sickened by commercial banking. Private-sector banks would meanwhile loathe the entire notion - a very good reason, of itself, to proceed. But you can guarantee that the demand for the privatisation of a thriving state enterprise would be heard the instant the dust had settled.
It might work, you see. It might work too well. It might demonstrate that obscene bonuses are no guarantee of expertise, and are inimical to probity. It might act as a reminder that ordinary customers need not be exploited to mask catastrophic inter-bank fun and games. It might, in short, give the unacceptable face of capitalism a slap.
All of which leads me to suspect that Lord Mandelson and his colleagues are raising many more hopes than they intend to fulfil. They will not find it so easy, however, to disown a good idea whose time is long overdue.