LIVERPOOL and Everton playing in their old stadia for years to come. The second crossing of the Mersey at Runcorn delayed indefinitely. Unemployment rising, wages depressed and our pension funds under threat.

I hope I’m wrong, but the politicians haven’t begun to spell out the consequences of the current financial disaster sweeping around us.

For once, I don’t think they are keeping the truth from us. I think they are as bewildered as we are by the collapse of many of the certainties that we have taken for granted in the last 60 years.

I am no financial expert, but it stands to reason that there are going to be huge implications following the Government’s bail- out of the banks.

We are normally asking the government for half a billion here and a quarter of a billion there for investment in schools, hospitals, a tram system.

On the national level, before all this started, the Ministry of Defence had “a financial crisis” over a £2bn black hole. The biggest figure ever squabbled over was the £25bn to upgrade our nuclear deterrent.

But this banking disaster has potentially exposed the Government to £500bn in loan guarantees. It may be “only £50bn”, but nobody knows.

I was chairing a property conference last week. Among the speakers were Jim Gill, Chief Executive of the Liverpool Vision Urban Regeneration Company, and the city council leader, Warren Bradley.

They tried to raise the spirits of the estate agents and property developers alarmed at falling prices and cancelled schemes.

Messrs Gill and Bradley echoed the findings of the Merseyside Economic Review just produced by The Mersey Partnership. Productivity growth rivalling London; tourism figures exceeding the expectations of the Capital of Culture Company; and the tenth successive year when the stock of businesses has grown.

On the strength of that, I concluded the conference by hoping that we’d prevented anyone throwing themselves off one of the many unlet blocks of city centre apartments. But it is difficult to be optimistic.

It is easier to be angry. I had an encounter with a banker the other day who protested to me that the media was conducting a vendetta against his profession. He operated in a small town and said all he had ever tried to do was help people get small-scale loans and mortgages.

Point taken. It’s also true that bankers and financiers lubricate the whole capitalist system.

But for years we have all been mesmerised, public and politicians alike, by the notion that old- fashioned banking and traditional building societies were fuddy- duddy. We had to make money “sweat”.

Now we know that meant lending it in vast quantities to people who couldn’t afford to pay it back.

We are all going to have to pay for this folly, and I fear for the consequences in public expenditure and services, let alone our private finances.