I'd thought the worst was probably over for bankers. After recent events, I fear I may have been wrong.

A bad week for bankers. For their collective image rather than their pay packets, that is. Just when we thought we’d supped our full of banking horrors, news emerged that RBS and HBOS had been bailed out last year (behind our backs) to the tune of £62bn (that’s half what the NHS costs us annually). Lloyds TSB shareholders, who were not the happiest bunnies in the marketplace, have blown a collective fuse.

I’d thought during the Summer that the worst of the heat may have been off for the bankers; that they were finding a path to redemption and a route back to some sort of acceptance among the public at large. I fear I may have been wrong.

First, there was the weeping sore that is Goldman Sachs - who are currently coining it in and are about to share out in excess of $17 billion in bonuses. After a lot of goading (and being called a blood-sucking squid) they came out and agreed to justify themselves in a long feature that appeared in the Sunday Times magazine. I can’t say that they came over as an especially attractive lot, worshipping 24/7 at the altar of Mammon, but they made their point: we’re the smartest guys in the room, and it was the dummies like those at RBS and HBOS that got you lot into your pitiful mess.

But during the course of this article their boss, Bronx-born Lloyd Blankfein, let slip the suggestion that they were doing 'God’s work'. This was probably an ironic quip, an aside to show he has a sense of humour. But it has gone down like a cup of cold sick (not least with God himself, I should imagine). Goldman is now incandescent with rage, and will probably never give a media interview ever again. For the first time in years, it's also refused to publish its annual list of those being promoted to managing director. It used to be a cause of celebration and congratulations – now they probably fear they’d be lynched like those on Sarah’s List of paedophiles.

Then came yesterday’s news that the Supreme Court had ruled that the issue of unfair overdraft charges falls outside the scope of the Office of Fair Trading. The banks had won their battle. Within one minute of the announcement being made, it was the most read story on the BBC’s website - and there were very few people defending the banks.

The public mood is now very ugly. When even dry old sticks like Martin Wolf in the FT feel that a windfall tax on banks is an acceptable punishment, things have got very bad indeed. But it’s hard to see that the bankers are taking any notice. One is quoted in The Times yesterday as saying: 'We’re not like coal miners, fishermen or politicians. We are indispensable. Without the City, Britain is nothing. It’s in everyone’s interests for us to succeed even if you don’t like us very much.'

Finally comes the Walker report, which is recommending that the banks reveal how many of its employees earn more than a million a year. No names, just numbers. I fail to see the point of this. All it does is whip all those who earn less than a million a year into a fit of jealous indignation. It may well highlight the fact that the gap between bankers and the rest of us who struggle with a bombed-out economy is widening, but where does it get anyone?

I fear a lot more grief is heading in bankers' directions, as they become whipping boys during an election campaign. Some polls are showing they are currently more unpopular than politicians. That took some doing.

The M&S succession has long been a good spectator sport. But I think Stuart Rose has pulled off quite a coup with Marc Bolland.

Succession struggles at M&S are one of this nation’s favourite spectator sports. Ten years ago, one of the first features I ever wrote for MT concerned the mess that the legendary Sir Richard Greenbury got himself into when trying to shoehorn a bloke called Peter Salsbury into the top job. We called it 'King Richard: A tragedy in Three Acts'. After that debacle, M&S worked its way through Luc Vandervelde and the hapless Roger Holmes, before matinee idol Stuart Rose came to the rescue - eventually becoming the darling who had his picture taken with check-outs operatives whenever he visited stores.

The hundreds of column inches and hours of TV time devoted to Marc Bolland and his new role are quite extraordinary. My sense is that Rose has scored a real coup with netting 'Billion Pound' Bolland, as he as already been named. And it’s a coup for many reasons. Bolland is a hot-shot and clearly has talent – anyone who can successfully run a lager stall in the Democratic republic of Congo is worth watching. Some have moaned that he knows nothing about clothing but he knew very little about food retailing before he arrived at Morrisons. Besides, M&S’s food department needs a long, hard look at the moment (although including marmite and Kellogg’s cornflakes on the shelves might help).

But, most importantly, he’s an outsider. As such, he won’t have such a sense of who the sacred cows are and where they graze in the M&S pasture. There are some tough decisions to be made at M&S over the next two years that may well involve some startling changes of approach. The organisation is being squeezed in the middle ground it occupies both in food and clothing. Bolland has the swagger of a marketing man and an internationalist. He won’t mind ruffling a few feathers.

Rose knows this, and that’s why when asked why he went for Bolland he said: 'He is a turnaround expert, and we are a business where in some areas we need to make changes. He has the energy, the youth and the desire to do it. Pace is important, we live in an increasingly global environment. Marc is an energetic man and I imagine he will act at pace.' The winds of change are about to start gusting through Paddington basin.

Apparently nurses need degrees for 'critical decision-making skills'. But you don’t need to be a graduate for that.

A great debate this morning about whether nurses need to be graduates. In four years' time, anyone who wants to become one of the nation’s 400,000 nurses will need to have a degree. This is one of the biggest shake-ups of medical education in the history of the NHS.

More than a quarter of nurses, incidentally, already have a degree and the level of qualifications has risen steadily in recent years. But this has caused an almighty row. And not for the first time, the nursing unions seem to be making a lot more sense than the representatives of the NHS. There’s an awful lot of guff being spouted by the department about the need to 'meet the challenges of tomorrow' and for 'critical decision-making skills'. But I fail to see how the ability to learn how to make decisions is a graduate-only business.

Unison and Unite have insisted there is 'no compelling evidence' that degrees would improve patient treatment, claiming 'the emphasis should be on competence, not on unfounded notions about academic ability'.

There is nothing wrong with having a degree in nursing, providing it teaches the correct things. A respondent to the Times this morning complains: 'Some of the degree holders see their main role as management and very little of it as nursing, creating the impression of a two-tier nursing system. I have seen much of the most important work (maintaining patient dignity, providing compassion) fall to health care assistants'.

There is nothing wrong with management. You’d hardly expect me to say otherwise. But the role of management is to make sure that the important work at the coal-face is done properly - and one sees and hears of far too many examples in nursing of the caring being neglected for the sociology and the paperwork.

Here's another Times Online correspondent: 'I have found myself doubting the motivation of those degree-level students that I have worked alongside. In my last position within a busy Intensive Care Unit, I worked with both degree and diploma level students & found their contrasting attitudes remarkable. There was a definite gulf & almost snobbery between the two groups, with the diploma group being almost considered inferior to their degree-level colleagues. Unfortunately when it came to carrying out direct personal patient care (surely the essence of 'nursing') the gulf in attitudes was appalling. Whilst for the main part the diploma students were happy to roll their sleeps up & help with washing, toileting & mobilising patients. Indeed, I recall asking a degree level student nurse to assist me in cleaning a patient who had soiled themself, only to be met with the response: 'I don't really want to do that, I came here to learn how life support machines work'.

I actually have some first-hand experience of this. Years ago I worked for a summer as a care assistant in an old people’s home. That’s about the lowest of the low in the nursing hierarchy, but I have to say it was one of the richer experiences of my working life. Not only did I carry a 95-year-old on my back during a fire scare down five flights of stairs – he was amused – but I did all the bum-wiping, bed pans and feeding. I shall never forget the morning I clocked on at 7am and pulled back the bed covers of some of the residents, to discover that two-thirds of them had come down with a gastric bug. But mostly it was a lot of sitting around listening. Such things are actually a vital part of the care process and help people get better faster. And if they can’t be made better, it makes their passing more tolerable. It might not be sexy like an action-packed episode of ER with portable chest x-rays, chem. 7s and CBCs, but it’s one of the vital roles nurses perform.  

You don’t need a degree to hold a hand, reassure and comfort. You can, of course, have a degree and still be good at these vital things - but a substantial part of any nursing qualification must be to emphasise their importance. 

I really hope this historic UK company doesn't get swallowed up into a soulless conglomerate.

Kraft’s low-ball offer for Cadbury yesterday may have taken a few people by surprise. However, nobody in their right mind thinks Cadbury has seen the last of Kraft - the tanks aren’t off the lawn yet. In the old days, a knockout blow in the form of an enormous bid would have been on the table by now; General Wasserstein would have been there in his tin hat yelling from the turret, as he led the advance of the squadron of Shermans. But these are more cautious times, and Kraft must be convinced they can acquire Cadbury far more cheaply than in the days of plenty.

What should we wish for as an outcome? If one is being hard-nosed and purist about it, providing Kraft’s price is right, we should not object to the British firm being taken over. If Cadbury was French, it would be an altogether different story. Look at the palaver a few years back when Pepsi began to sniff around Danone, the water and yogurt maker. Danone got itself added to France’s nuclear power industry in a list of enterprises vital to national strategic interests, making it invulnerable to takeover. I’m not for one moment suggesting that our Government should begin behaving in the chauvinist and illegal way that some of our Europeans brethren seem to do with such impunity. I don’t think our national interests will be fatally undermined if the makers of the Curly Wurly aren’t Brits.

But Cadbury forms a key and highly distinguished part of British business tradition. Founded by British quakers it has a noble history of enlightened and philanthropic management, combined with a skill in building highly successful and much loved brands.   However much Kraft protests that this tradition would not be lost after a takeover, this cannot be the case. Kraft is a grinding, anonymous conglomerate.

More broadly, we’ve got to consider what we want to have left in the way of UK business. If we are going to try to redefine our economy then it’s worth trying to establish what we’re good at and is worth preserving. Cadbury won MT’s award for Britain's Most Admired Company back in 2004, but it’s interesting to see how the pool of great UK companies has shrunk even since then. How many more of our scarce tray of crown jewels will we allow to disappear or pass into foreign ownership before we get worried? Before the crash it was highly unfashionable to utter such sentiments. We were believers in letting the market decide - and besides, our great strength in financial services would remedy shortfalls in other areas. You don’t hear that sort of talk much as this decade comes to a close.

So, I make no bones about admitting I hope that Kraft fails. Put the pacifist tendencies of your management forebears to one side and stick it to 'em, Todd. But weep as you sign the enormous defence cheques to your advisors Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and UBS. What a dreadful waste of hard-earned cash.

US railways are mostly used by freight, not people. But maybe the Sage of Omaha thinks that will change.

So Warren Buffett is betting the farm on the US railroad system. His Berkshire Hathaway vehicle has just spent $27 billion dollars – his biggest single punt ever – on the purchase of Burlington Northern Santa Fe, whose origins date back to 1849.

This came initially as a bit of a surpise to me, because most of the journeys I’ve made by train in the US have been pulled by steam engines on preserved tourist lines. I wouldn’t for one moment want you to get the impression that I’m a borderline autistic spectrum spotter in a cagoule, but, inside a week, I once clanked along at about 10mph on the Durango to Silverton, the Georgetown Loop and the Cumbres and Toltec. All three are in Colorado, where the state boasts a greater head of steam than a Chinese laundry.   

The railway made America. As they pushed out West, the first problems faced by the rail pioneers were hostile Indians who resented iron horses on their hunting grounds. And a few of Kevin Costner's irate native pals were nothing compared to the obstacles the palefaces met when they reached the foothills of the Rockies.  Colorado has 75% of the area over 10,000 feet in the United States, with 53 peaks over 14,000 feet and locomotives cope poorly with slopes.

But the US nation fell out of love with railways in a big way, preferring road and air for both long and short hop travel. But the reason why Warren has made his move is that despite the fact that people don’t by and large use trains in the US – freight does. At 2820 billions of tonne kilometres their freight rail usage is the highest in the world.   

So Warren is gambling on several things. Firstly, that the US economy will recover and those wagons will fill up with Chinese imports again. Second, that  environmental concerns will further favour rail. Thirdly, he dislikes competitor-filled markets. And nobody in their right mind is going to start laying iron track to create a rival railroad. It’s the classic, long-term value investment and has been, yet again, derided as “boring.”

In the meantime our railways in the UK are in a fairly sorry state. Nobody wanted to invest in National Express’s rail franchise, forcing the government has been forced to take it over, while this week we saw the first ever £1,000 fare. To look at how we got left behind in the dash for high speed rail travel, have a read of Simon Caulkin's interesting piece from this month's MT. You'll have noticed that Buffett isn't investing in our rail network.

Maybe it’s the rain, but it seems as if the last week has been one of the more depressing since the onset of the financial crisis. The first phase is now over: survivors are walking around in a daze and the smoke is clearing but there aren’t many green shoots in the bombed-out and blackened landscape.

First, there was the bad news that while other large economies are coming out of recession, we’re still stuck in the mire; paying the greater penalty for our more grievous sins of the Uk’s last decade. Rather than being in the best possible shape compared to our competitors going into a downturn, as Gordon Brown promised us, we are the poor sap with the weakened immune system who’s copped a dose of H1N1.  Some are saying it could go on well into 2010, with Fathom sugegsting we may only get pathetic growth of 0.1 % next year. Consumers are trying to be virtuous by saving not spending; as the tax take drops further, the long-awaited belt-tightening by government has to come after the election - which sucks still more cash out of circulation. It all sounds alarmingly like the notorious Japanese debt deflation death spiral.

Then there are our state-owned banks which, following the enthusiastic interference of the EU competition prefects, appear to be on the verge of dismemberment. It’s hardly surprising that Stephen Hester is seriously peeved at what he’s being told he has to flog, because it will make his job getting RBS back onto a sound footing that much more difficult. These punishments all play well to the gallery, but subjecting RBS to a ritual public hanging, drawing and quartering make less sense if it means it ends up being less viable as a business. That way we are all going to lose out, because we’ll never get our cash back. If I’ve got to own a bank, I’d rather it was a good one with decent profit prospects than a cruelly humiliated and forlorn lame duck.

Just as my customary cheer levels were faltering - and I watched a couple of colleagues eating their home-made rather than Pret sandwich for lunch - I read yet another gloomy (but quite sensible) article, this time by Prospect editor David Goodhart. He says that the crisis has finally knocked us from the top table rudely onto the floor. 'Great' Britain, after a century of slow decline is now well and truly a thing of the past, and we just need to accept that we’re Little Britain and that 'we are going to need a new, more modest story about Britain in the world.' He doesn’t think this new, more realistic approach to our true national standing would do too much harm. The game is up for most of us in the West, anyway, as the Chinese are to be our true masters for the next few decades.  

If that means we no longer go on sabre-rattling international adventures of the sort favoured by Blair, that mightn’t be a bad thing. I can see us quite happily kicking Trident into touch and saying 'thanks but no thanks' the next time the Americans want us shoulder-to-shoulder when they go into Iraq or Afghanistan. Goodhart thinks David Cameron 'well suited to speak for a smaller, quieter land'.

With our national prestige at a low ebb, we’ve got to discover/rediscover what it is we’re good at as a nation and focus on these strengths. But are Goodhart’s suggestions - the English language, pop music and the Premier League - really as good as it gets for us in 2010?

Then again - how can we be too down-hearted in the week that Kai Wayne Rooney entered this world? He's just 1000-1 to become Prime Minister one day, you know.