ALISTAIR Darling provoked the loudest guffaws of incredulity — both inside the Commons chamber and across the City — during his Budget speech when he claimed that the economy would grow 1.25% in 2010 and, amazingly, 3.5% in 2011.

In the words of the Centre for Economic and Business Research, a rate of 3.5% is “double what most economists expect and higher than any reputable forecaster is assuming”. Of course, by 2011, Darling won't be anywhere near the Treasury to worry about that…

* “WE know, from previous recessions, that people's greatest fears are the loss of their job... and that they, and their family, will also lose their homes,” said Alistair Darling. Did he mean people will lose more than one home? Such as Labour MPs, with their second home on Commons expenses, and a general election coming?

* WHO wants to join the Bank of England monetary policy committee? Says the Bank's job advert: “Candidates must be independently minded and be able to exert their influence within the Bank, the MPC and in the wider external debate.” But, as departing MPC member David Blanchflower can testify, will Governor Mervyn King and the other Bank insiders listen? By the way, total remuneration is £128,600 a year for a three-day week although jet-setter Blanchflower also racked up hefty expenses of as much as £5000 a month flying in from the East Coast of America. But for what? His prescient warnings about recession were ignored.

* BOBBLE hats off to trainspotter-in-chief Nigel Harris, editor of Rail magazine, who says the Budget will provoke a financial — and geometric — calamity for industry investment. “The railway,” warns Harris, “would do well to get its wagons in a circle to fight its corner”.

Bankers are going, going, gown

HERE is a career trajectory Fred the Shred might want to follow. The latest news from Wall Street suggests that swapping pinstripe suits for corduroy jackets is the in thing to do.

There's Frank Yeary, Citigroup's former head of M&A, now a vice-chancellor at Berkeley, University of California, and then Citi's ex-head of investment banking, Michael Klein, who is teaching at Princeton, while Goldman Sachs' former head of investment management, Edward Frost, is on the payroll at Harvard.

But best of all is Greg Fleming, former president of Merrill Lynch and in charge of the bank's risk management, who has joined Yale Law School. One of his classes is about explaining “economic events of the past year.”

* Early this week, Financial Times editor Lionel Barber told his audience at Yale for the annual Poynter journalism lecture that the financial media could and should have better anticipated the credit crunch. But at least they're not politicians. He said the Commons Treasury Select Committee was like “the House Financial Services Committee without the cerebral wit of Barney Frank.” He's right about that -— Frank's forthcoming autobiography is called The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman.

Warehouse comes full circle

THERE is a certain irony to Carphone Warehouse's re-listing in the FTSE 100 under “telecoms”.
When Carphone floated at the start of the decade it entered straight into the very same telecoms sector.

This was a fantastic coup for founding chief executive Charles Dunstone and his canny advisers. Telecoms carried a far higher investor rating than most market sectors. Yet Carphone was patently a retailer. The FTSE folk later grew wise and put Carphone with the shopkeepers. Carphone is only returning to telecoms as its fixed-line/broadband business is now bigger than its suffering mobile phone-selling operation.

* THIS weekend's Sunday Times Rich List will doubtless mark another triumph for Philip Beresford, the survey's long-time compiler. City Spy is reminded of when Beresford met Princess Diana at a party in 1996. She was with friends and Beresford joined her circle. She asked what he did and when he told her, the princess replied: “How interesting, I always read it.” Beresford inquired: “Shouldn't you be in it?” Diana smiled and said: “Wouldn't you like to know.” Whereupon he asked: “Seriously, how much are you worth?” Cue frozen smile from her, ranks closing and Beresford left looking for someone else to talk to.

* WHAT a wonder not running ITV can do for you. Charles Allen, now chairman of Global Radio, EMI and a non-executive director of Tesco, was telling friends how he has lost two and a half stone since leaving the channel in 2006. How? He only eats half the food on his plate. Allen always was good at cutting things…

* RECESSION, what recession? — that's what Bharat and Ketan Mehta are thinking. The Kenyan-born brothers who run pharma company Necessity Supplies took a £20 million dividend last year while a separate family business, Primecrown, netted them another £8.5 million in divis. Nice work.

Icelandic loss fails to freeze out Freer

AS City Spy readers may recall, Barnet Council leader Mike Freer is the ambitious former Barclays banker who was in charge as the council blew £28 million of taxpayers' money on Icelandic investments.

Despite that fiasco, he is still being pushed by the Tories to run for Lady Thatcher's old seat of Finchley and Golders Green. And he has just issued an extraordinary statement criticising his staff for misleading him over Iceland. This followed a cross-party probe's finding that 89% of deposits of taxpayers' money by Barnet between April 2006 and October 2008 did not meet approved credit rating criteria.

Treasury manager Patrick Towey resigned, and Freer demanded a full inquiry. But Freer's critics point out he was also leader and head of the cabinet resources committee which runs Barnet's finances, so should have had a far tighter rein...

* CYNICS claim Vanessa Gearson is behind Freer's aggressive stance. Gearson was the “assassin in heels” at the heart of Iain Duncan Smith's Betsygate scandal. An adviser to the then Tory leader, Gearson wrote an email querying his wife being on the payroll.

She is now communications manager at the council's strategy unit. Barnet emphatically
denies she was involved in the Freer statement...