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The Bank of England has issued its - and it's decided that things in the banking world aren't very stable at all.

You might hope this would not come as a surprise, least of all to the Bank of England itself. After all, we're relying on the Bank to guide us through the current crisis. The Bank is doing much of the detailed work behind the scenes on the high street bank bail-outs.

Yet today's report - warning that banks will have to curb their loans to us in the years ahead - is quite different in tone from the issued just six months ago. Then, the Bank said "the most likely path ahead is that confidence will return gradually". Now it says banks need a "fundamental rethink". And in between the two reports, we had what it now calls the "biggest episode of instability since the start of World War I".

Robert Peston, our business editor, has written magnificently once again on the topic. He reckons the banks' bail-out has now cost 5 trillion pounds.

But if you're unsure of all the high-flown talk about "benign international macroeconomic conditions" or vulnerability "to credit and liquidity risks", fear not. We've got the plain English guide to the Bank of England report at 1230, or a time of your choosing after that on iPlayer or the website. If you ask in the comments, I'll post the script on the blog too.

Just a word about those numbers - I'm using the standard terms they use in the City and financial circles nowadays. By 5 trillion I mean 5,000 billion - which in turn means 5,000-thousand-million - or 5,000,000,000,000. Now to my mind, that's wrong. I was brought up using the British scientific measurements - by which 1 billion was a million-million, not the thousand-million the City uses. On that scale, a trillion is a lot more than it actually is. But who are we to argue with the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe?