Let's add up the extraordinary announcements this morning.

1) Taxpayers are injecting £37bn of capital into just three banks, RBS, HBOS and Lloyds - with RBS and HBOS taking £31.5bn of that (this is nationalisation Jim, though perhaps not precisely as we know it);

2) RBS and Lloyds TSB/HBOS have promised to the government that they'll maintain mortgage lending and small-business lending at 2007 levels - which is massively more than they are currently lending (this is hugely significant - given that a shortage of credit is to a large extent behind the economy's deceleration into recession levels);

3) Lloyds TSB is paying less to buy HBOS than it originally announced, to reflect the disclosure that HBOS's problems are rather worse than it thought just a couple of weeks ago;

4) Barclays is raising £10bn from selling new shares and securities to private-sector investors, abandoning its dividend for the second half of this year, and taking other actions;

5) So total capital raising today, including fairly modest amounts being raised from private sources by the UK businesses of HSBC and Santander, is nudging £50bn (wow);

6) The Bank of England and other central banks have announced they are lending as many dollars as are needed by banks (phew);

7) Eurozone governments are today fleshing out their plans to inject capital into their own banks and to guarantee lending between banks (double phew);

8) Stock markets and money markets are in slightly better shape this morning - which is something of a relief, because if they can't be buoyed by so much taxpayers' money being chucked at the banks, then we would be in rather more serious trouble than I feared.