IT SEEMS we’re nowhere near out of the woods yet as far as the economy is concerned.

According to latest reports the recession is deeper than at first thought, it will take longer to recover from it and there are still likely to be a lot more redundancies in coming months.

Add to that the rubbish summer weather we’re having and being in dear old England is not exactly a barrel full of laughs just now.

Of course the sums of money being bandied about are up in the stratosphere as far as most of us are concerned.

When you’re limping along with about fifteen quid in your wallet, talk of a £4 billion loss by Lloyds TSB last week is eye-watering.

Still it didn’t prompt a Wild West-style rush by customers to extract their money. However the Bank of England managed to trump this by announcing it was extending its ‘quantitative easing programme’ by £50bn.

To take that out of the world of business speak and put it into pub talk jargon, that means it’s printing more money and isn’t that an interesting solution.

Recession? Economy in free fall? Just print more cash. Of course it’s not a real answer because if you keep driving down that road you’d need a wheelbarrow to take your worthless wages home, but the reason given for doing it is ‘interesting’.

In its statement the Bank of England said that the world economy remains in recession and financial conditions remain fragile so it decided to pump more money into the high street banks which will enable them to lend money to help lift us out of the recession.

Excuse me? I thought it was the level of lending and borrowing that had got us into this mess in the first place so the logic of this plan escapes me, but then my grasp of things fiscal is a bit flaky at best.

Still the Government and financial institutions are clearly showing us all a way forward here.

So I feel we should take a leaf out of the same book. Of course printing your own money is a tad tricky. Not only is it illegal, but I don’t think my John Bull Printing Set is quite up to the job, but the precedent has been put in place.

Consequently I plan to start my own bank with its own money. The Mortimer Financial Institution (I know the acronym isn’t new, but it did become redundant so I can get some cheap signs) is on the brink of being launched.

Unfortunately at this present time I don’t have the funds to set up a mint, but being the proud possessor of a special edition of Monopoly – all the street names are places where I have lived – I will be using its money for the MFI bank.

I am currently negotiating with certain outlets to accept this as viable tender and the response has been favourable.

Mr J D R Swan, a local butcher, said: “Well I don’t see why we shouldn’t, it’s about on a par with the cash we’re using these days.”

Miss Delores Fontain, ladies hairdresser, said: “We will be proud to accept the Monopoly money, the colours are so pretty.”

It is conceivable, of course, that our limited funds will quickly come under pressure, causing an early economic crisis for the Mortimer bank, but this can easily be remedied. We will enter the eBay market buying up copies of Monopoly as well as scouring car boot sales to improve our cash flow.

We will also follow current fiscal practice giving huge bonuses to key staff ... namely me ... regardless of whether or not we make a profit.

And of course the Monopoly model also opens the huge potential for us to enter the property market.

But let’s not over-reach ourselves ... oh hang it, why not. The Government appears to be doing so.