When banks lent lots of money to people who couldn’t afford to pay it back they started to go under, am I right? writes Dan Wainwright.

That’s how this credit crunch started, at least as far as I, a simple layman, understand.

So how is it going to help things if the Government basically takes £20 billion and lets us spend it now and pay back later?

If Alistair Darling didn’t want to give us this break and get us buying flatscreen TVs when things were going well, then why is he encouraging us to spend now when we’ve got nothing to pay it back with?

Surely the last person you give a loan to is the bloke with the bailiffs camped on the drive swigging from his milk bottles and eyeing up his Ford Focus.

Please, somebody, help me with this. I’m not stupid. I got my GCSEs, A-Levels and a 2.1 degree from a respectable university but I just cannot get my head around the credit crunch.

The bailout package has more zeros than the cast list of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here but that figure must surely be dwarfed by the amount the government will have to pay back to foreign investors in the next few years – for which we will pay more tax.

Now I do get that we need to spend money in order to keep British businesses afloat. What I don’t understand is where they expect us to spend it. Most of our manufacturing has been lost overseas so how is it going to help our economy if we’re just spending more money on things made in other countries?

My confusion on this is compounded by the fact that Jaguar Land Rover, the Indian-owned British car manufacturer, needs a £1 billion loan on top of everything else. So evidently the money off our VAT offered this week isn’t going far enough to save the factories we still have.

Does the government want more people to take out mortgages to fill all those empty trendy new flats thrown up over the last 10 years? If so are the banks still going to give a 125 per cent deal? That’s the one where, in the words of a comedian on Mock The Week, the man walking past on the pavement owns more of the property than you, because he owns 0 per cent and you own -25 per cent.

Now that it’s clear that Gordon Brown hasn’t ended boom and bust I think I’ll avoid blowing my cash on a Blu-Ray player, with a £2.50 reduction in VAT, and save it. Even if I can’t get a decent interest rate then, call me selfish, the last place I want my money right now is in the economy, especially if I’ve got to help bail Darling out on this loan.