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The Bank of England has provided this £185bn in the form of Treasury Bills - which are short-dated government bonds that can easily be turned into cash. And in return it has received £287bn of collateral from the banks, in the form of loans made by those banks.

All of those loans received from the banks have been securitised or turned into tradable securities. And most of them are residential mortgages converted into mortgage-backed securities.

So the best way of seeing all this is as a three-year loan of £185bn to the banks, made by all of us as taxpayers, for which we've received £287bn of assets.

And, what's more, we've received a fee of 1.15% for our trouble.

For British taxpayers, that doesn't look such a terrible deal. The risk of loss to us, given that we've lent £102bn less than the face value of the collateral we've been given, looks pretty small.

But it shows you quite how serious it was that the commercial market for mortgage-backed securities had collapsed and quite how desperate the banks were to raise cash.