Tonight:
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Here is the central conundrum of the Brown premiership. A man who was raised to the Labour leadership on the laurels of his economic competence now presides over a slump unprecedented in recent years and forecast to get worse. It is the dominant factor in his record poll slump - and yet he believes that it is the issue that can save his government from a Tory defeat.
Those livid plummeting graphs tell their own story: rising inflation (again), the lowest mortgage approval rate in a decade and a swooping stock market. David Cameron picked out something important in the public mood in his own treatise on our economic woes yesterday when he noted that the mood had shifted from anger with the Government to a generalised anxiety
The PM is at the sharp end of this as the man whose Goldilocks economy has changed abruptly to base metal. Some of this is bad luck, some of it bad management, and we should in all fairness try to sort out which is which.
Pinning the downturn on Mr Brown's record alone is not really credible. Even David Cameron and George Osborne tread lightly with this charge and are now focusing their speeches on who has the better instincts about putting things right.
Of course there have been Cassandras warning about cheap credit fuelling the housing market. Largely, however, the availability of large mortgages was seen to fuel an aspirant society. Which mainstream politician wanted to say no to voters taking the next step on the property ladder? Credit has fuelled a period of extraordinary growth and prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic.
No serious economic Conservative in recent years would have embraced the alternative, which is credit controls, last deployed by Nigel Lawson - and deemed heavy-handed even then.
If Left-of-centre governments are often accused of going against the grain of human nature, in the case of the UK property market, they went enthusiastically with the grain of the great British public, which is to climb onto the housing ladder by hook or by crook. So America and Britain are worst hit now because they have high home ownership - a foible of the Anglo-Saxon world - exacerbated by inflationary pressure wafting though from China (10 per cent without a property spiral in the People's Republic) and steep oil price rises.
In that sense, Mr Brown was right this week when he underlined that this is an international crisis. Alas for him, saying so does not necessarily aid his case that he is the man to redress it.
He is now, in so many regards, a man in the shadow of his own past. In part because the economic tide had turned against him. But also, for all his flaws, because he was a far more persuasive figure in his old job than in his new one.
Still, many of his woes reaped today were sown then. We all remember the "no return to boom and bust" mantra which marked his Budget days. I remember, after the umpteenth invocation, raising with his then senior aide and now possible successor, Mr Ed Balls , the idea that no Chancellor, however successful can obviate the business cycle and that one day, Mr Brown would be punished for his hubris in suggesting that he could.
Mr Balls was indignant that Mr Brown had created conditions virtually impervious to external shock - or at least better capable of absorbing them than anyone else. Had his boss meant that "no more boom and bust" was intended to carry the small print "unless there is a boatload of trouble in the US and elsewhere", he could have told us so. He preferred to reap the reputation of a unique standing in the world.
His weaknesses as a communicator also show more under the present duress. Watching him deliver a recent speech, it struck me that the experience is like attending a seminar on the world economy one did not want to be at in the first place.
It is little comfort to worried voters that their problems are part of a worldwide shake-out. If anything, it makes them feel even more helpless and anxious about what their government can do to help. The PM is, however, adamant that this is where his focus must lie. "What are people talking about more than anything else?," he asks visitors. "The economy," they chorus. "That," says Mr B, "is why I talk about it so much."
This week, he has had stiff competition. Both Cameron and Osborne ventured forth with speeches on the economy yesterday (typically, you wait for one and two come along at once).
The battle between the parties is now a very different one from that forecast by either party a year ago. Then Mr Brown's aides were confidently briefing a short, shallow downturn from which we would recover in time for the election. The Conservatives were still " sharing the proceeds of growth" as a relatively luxurious way of apportioning the nation's spoils and emphasising that Mr Cameron's "sunlit uplands" optimism would beat pessimism. A degree of pessimism does rather seem the wise course to take right now.
Meanwhile, the Opposition's approach is shifting as the skies darken. Mr Cameron has a good sense of mood and is cautioning Tories who persist in believing that simply bashing the Government will get them elected with conviction.
As the political year draws to a close, he and Mr Osborne want to be at the front of the economic debate in signalling a distinctive set of remedies, not just performing a Punch and Judy on poor old Gordon. They know that the less people trust Labour, the more they want a sense of what the alternative would look like.
Reading both speeches, I would argue that this is work in progress. Mr Osborne cleverly wove a seamless garment from education reform to greater prosperity. I agree with everything he says on a linkage which needs to be driven home to every defender of the status quo in education. But there is a timeline the Tories need to make clearer in establishing how quickly they expect concrete changes to result from their adjustments to schools and welfare, so that the suspicious response is not "Oh no: more bloody reform to no clear end" (the late-Blair problem).
The economic short-term solutions at the disposal of an Opposition are frankly limited. So I would view with some scepticism the commitment by Mr Cameron to "diversify the economy". We might recall that it was undiversified away from manufacturing under Margaret Thatcher long ago. It is hard to see a major realignment towards manufacturing of any significance.
What matters to voters is which party has sounded reliable and straightforward in hard times. That is the uphill struggle for Mr Brown, who for so long talked as if hard times would never come. It is a new world, too, for Mr Cameron, the product of our prosperous years, facing our new age of austerity.
