Okay, so Treasury bond buyers made a capital gain as banking stocks and corporate debt collapsed, but only in return for wildly negative yields after inflation. Stock traders won some, lost some, and came out of the first quarter well below zero. And cash debtors – those poor schmucks underpinning this whole mess – made a little watching inflation eat into their principal, but they hit serious trouble refinancing their loans.

Here in the UK, the number of mortgage products on offer slumped by one-fifth at the start of April says one estimate. Home-loan brokers got to work and found some 1,000 offerings had vanished. This week then saw First Direct suspend all new mortgage lending, claiming it was overwhelmed by applications for its 5.0% fixed-rate deal – which is precisely where the Bank of England’s key lending rate will end up in May if not April.

So central banks can’t control interest rates, while private banks aren’t winning either. Nor are their customers, shareholders or managers. Even the early beneficiaries of the credit crunch (or rather, the “solvency slump”) got whacked for 10¢ in the dollar between mid-March and April Fool’s Day when commodity prices sank at their fastest pace since the early 1980s.

Is nobody set to make a profit from this mess? Food-price inflation threatens social unrest in 33 emerging economies worldwide, said the World Bank this week. Yet even traders caught holding soybean futures as March went out like a lion got eaten alive!

“Arabs without oil hard hit by food price spiral,” confirms Reuters, quoting a dry-cleaning manager in Damascus, Syria. “Even parsley, which has been dirt cheap for as long as I can remember, has tripled,” the laundry-man went on.

But with the CRB-Reuters commodities index losing more than 10% inside a fortnight, it’s almost enough to make you question the future of this truly historic bull market.

Thank heavens we’ve got the Fed to sort everything out!

The up-swing in world commodity prices starting at the turn of the century might just get killed by the global banking crisis.

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