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“The lack of confidence is total,” Miguel Angel Fernandez Ordonez said in an interview with Spain’s El Pais daily.

“The inter-bank (lending) market is not functioning and this is generating vicious cycles: consumers are not consuming, businessmen are not taking on workers, investors are not investing and the banks are not lending.

“There is an almost total paralysis from which no-one is escaping,” he said, adding that any recovery — pencilled in by optimists for the end of 2009 and the start of 2010 — could be delayed if confidence is not restored.

Ordonez recognised that falling oil prices and lower taxes could kick-start a faster-than-anticipated recovery, but warned that a deepening cycle of falling consumer demand, rising unemployment and an ongoing lending squeeze could not be ruled out.

“This is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression” of 1929, he added.

Ordonez said the European Central Bank, of which he is a governing council member, would cut interest rates in January if inflation expectations went much below two percent.

“If, among other variables, we observe that inflation expectations go much below two percent, it’s logical that we will lower rates.”

Regarding the dire situation in the United States, Ordonez said he backed the decision by the US Federal Reserve to cut interest rates almost to zero in the face of profound deflation fears.

Central banks are seeking to jumpstart movements on crucial interbank money markets that froze after the US market for high-risk, or subprime mortgages collapsed in mid 2007, and locked tighter after the US investment bank Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy in mid September.

The carmaker will post a 150 billion yen ($1.7 billion) loss in the year through March, it said in a statement today, scrapping a previous forecast of a 600 billion yen profit.

“The environment we’re in is extremely tough,” President Katsuaki Watanabe told reporters today in Nagoya. “We’re facing an unprecedented emergency situation. Unfortunately, we can’t see the bottom.”

Moody’s is reviewing the carmaker’s “Aaa” rating on $19 billion of debt, possibly boosting the company’s borrowing costs amid tightening credit markets and the worst U.S. auto sales in 26 years. Watanabe has cut contract jobs, production and executive pay including board-members’ bonuses this fiscal year in a bid to offset slumping demand and a strong yen.

“Toyota’s cost-cutting can’t match plummeting sales,” said Koichi Ogawa, chief portfolio manager at Tokyo-based Daiwa SB Investments Ltd., which manages $28 billion. “Everyone is getting hurt with this situation.”

The automaker lowered its net income forecast 91 percent to 50 billion yen. The last time Toyota posted an operating loss was in the year ended March 1938, said spokesman Hideaki Homma.

General David McKiernan, the US commander in Afghanistan, has asked for more than 20,000 extra US soldiers to counter a rise in insurgent violence, seven years after US forces first invaded the country to oust the Taliban from power.

But the potential deployment of 30,000 extra troops discussed by Mullen — the highest-ranking US military officer — would nearly double the US military presence in Afghanistan, which currently stands at 31,000.

“The troops that were asked for in joint discussions with General McKiernan is what we’re going to need for the foreseeable future. So I don’t see an increase any higher at this point than 20 to 30,000,” Mullen told reporters.

Mullen said he hoped the extra troops — including four combat brigades, an aviation brigade and other support forces — could be deployed by mid-2009.

“We’re looking to get them here in the spring, but certainly by the beginning of summer at the latest,” he said.

Mullen said he could not give the “exact number” of soldiers that would be sent, but said 20,000-30,000 represented “the window of the overall increase where we are right now.”

But he cautioned against thinking that a massive influx of US forces would automatically bring peace to the war-ravaged country.

“It isn’t going to make a difference after those troops get here, if we haven’t made progress on the development side and on the government side,” he said.

A stranger and more complicated personal history would have been difficult to invent, let alone comprehend. But Tyler Gray, a former Orlando Sentinel reporter who saw Pearlman’s O-Town pop factory up close, has done meticulous and highly readable work in chronicling the man’s peculiar glory and well-earned ruin.

Pearlman first found his niche in the prosaic trade of aircraft leasing and conducted himself around New York with a kind of Tinseltown savoir-faire before he gravitated to actual show business in Florida.

And he was more than a crooked money manager mingling legitimate, if dubious, enterprises with outright theft. (In the final tally he stole $500 million in investor cash, household savings and retiree nest eggs.) Using money from his con, this self-made hustler from Queens became a modern-day Colonel Parker of pop: Pearlman oversaw the creation of two bona-fide music juggernauts, Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync.

Gray astutely connects the New York and Orlando phases and the $3 million spent assembling, preparing and promoting the first of the two groups, Backstreet Boys:

“Part of his plot was to make the group look and sound successful long before they ever became stars — a fine, if not inexpensive, art Lou himself had honed as a Rolls-driving, penthouse-dwelling Queens fat cat.”

Tellingly, both acts would sue to get free of their Svengali, who regarded the lion’s share of their fantastic earnings as his due.

Pearlman’s involvement in the lives of young men and boys also bred questions about his behavior, and whether his Orlando kingdom was some kind of pedophile’s Eden. Gray confronts the issue but doesn’t settle it.

The end of that boy-band era in the 2000s coincided with the unraveling of Pearlman. Authorities acting on investor complaints closed in on him. The cash flow dried up. A Pearlman associate committed suicide. Pearlman fled the country, but finally had to face the music.

Christen Schnor, 49, was found by a hotel worker hanging by a belt in the closet of his £500-a-night suite at the Jumeirah Carlton Tower hotel in Knightsbridge, West London. A note was found by his naked body.

Mr Schnor worked at the bank’s offices at Canary Wharf, East London. He earned a six-figure salary as head of insurance with responsibility for Britain and the Middle East. Scotland Yard said that there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of the Danish-born banker.

Mr Schnor rented a four-bedroom apartment costing £390-a-day for his wife, Marianne, and two children in Lower Sloane Street near the hotel. It is understood that he was staying at the hotel while building work was being carried out at the apartment.

Christen Schnor, 49, was discovered by a hotel worker naked with a belt around his neck in the cupboard of his £500 a night suite.

The married father of two earned a six-figure salary as HSBC’s head of insurance and also had a seat on the bank’s executive committee.

A suicide note written in his native Danish was found next to his body when he was discovered last Wednesday afternoon.

Police are not treating the death as suspicious.

Mr Schnor and his wife, Marianne, rented a £390 a day four-bedroom flat in a Victorian mansion in Chelsea.

He was believed to be staying at the nearby Jumeriah Carlton Tower Hotel while building work was carried out on his flat.

Mr Schnor, a former soldier, also ran a real estate business in France with his wife and was described by friends as a man of ‘independent wealth.’

He joined HSBC last year from the pensions company Winterthur Group where he had been an executive board member since 2003.

At the time HSBC chief executive Dyfrig John said his proven expertise in the insurance industry would take the bank’s operations to a new level of ‘excellence and performance.’

A spokesman for the bank said last night: ‘Our thoughts are with his family and we will do all we can to help them at this difficult time.’

HSBC suffered 500 job losses earlier this month, but is regarded as one of the world’s strongest bank’s which is best prepared for the global financial crisis.

Mr Schnor grew up in Denmark and went to school in Runsted, an exclusive suburb north of the capital Copenhagen.

He later attended the city’s military academy and after graduating in 1984 spent five years in the army.

But he quit in 1989 and started a career in business with British Tyre & Rubber.

He received an MBA in international business from the Henley Management College in 1994 and went on to work in Hong Kong and Switzerland before moving to London.

But he continued to play a role in the Danish military and last year was appointed lieutenant colonel in the country’s army reserve.

A colleague said: ‘Christen did not seem under any pressure and was quiet man. He always appeared hard-working, diligent and very capable.’

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said officers were called to reports of a man found hanging in hotel room at 2.30pm on December 17.

He said: ‘The 49-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene.

‘A post mortem will take place in due course. His death is being treated as non-suspicious.’

Earlier this year Mr Schnor became embroiled in a legal row with the landlords of his rented flat after claiming he had to spend £4,500 decorating it, even though the agents had said it would be put in good decorative order when he moved in.

Hunt, 49, reportedly worked as secondary market manager for Community Bank & Trust’s mortgage department at the bank’s 414 E. 32nd St. location in Joplin, before resigning late last week.

According to police, Hunt’s adult children found her after 3 p.m. Tuesday, lying unconscious on the floor of her home on South Michigan Avenue. Hunt died a few hours later at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Joplin. Joplin police initially investigated the case as a suspicious death and requested assistance from the Tri-State Major Case Squad.

Hunt’s body was sent to the Boone County medical examiner, who determined that Hunt’s wounds were self-inflicted, police said. Police say that Hunt inflicted several wounds to her body with a small kitchen knife found beside her on the floor.

“Based on the results of the autopsy and the Tri-State Major Case Squad (investigation), the Jasper County coroner is going to rule the death a suicide,” said Joplin Police Cpl. Chuck Neiss.

Hunt was pictured in a Nov. 19, 2007, Springfield Business Journal and Joplin Tri-State Business publication honoring Community Bank & Trust as one of the Best Places to Work in southwest Missouri.

According to the Share International News Service, in a press release captioned Christmas Miracle, a “large bright star” will be appearing in the sky sometime over the next few days, or weeks, heralding the appearance on “a major US television programme” of the new World Teacher, Maitreya, who will be ushering in a new age of peace, wisdom and understanding. And not before time, I hear you say.

Share International is the organisation founded by Benjamin Creme, the Scottish painter and clairvoyant, and Britain’s most redoubtable millenarian, who has been prophesying the coming of Maitreya for the past 26 years.

He is an erstwhile Theosophist and student of Alice Bailey, whose writings in the 1920s talked of the coming of “the Cosmic Christ”. In 1982, Mr Creme took out full page advertisements in newspapers around the world to announce that Maitreya had arrived in London on a flight from Pakistan, having descended from the Himalayan redoubt where he had been living with a community of ascended Masters, who are watching over Mankind with a concerned eye, and was living among the Asian community.

Mr Creme was told this by one of the Masters, with whom he has been in telepathic communication since 1959 when the Master contacted Mr Creme while he was sitting in the bath.

The announcement of Maitreya’s arrival in London occasioned some excitement among newspapers. But when he failed to materialise, they promptly forgot all about Mr Creme. He is, however, one of the world’s great and indefatigable optimists. Undeterred, at the age of 86 he continues to travel the world, lecturing about the coming of the Maitreya, and publishing his not-for-profit magazine Share International.

I have known Mr Creme for a number of years, and like him enormously. He lives in a modest semi-detached house in Tuffnell Park, north London, with his wife Phyllis, a lecturer. He has a built a shed at the bottom of the garden where a group assembles twice a week for “transmission meditation”. I remember asking him if I might speak to his Master. “Ask away,” he said. I posed a question. Mr Creme was silent for a moment, cocking his head to his Master’s voice, then gave a chuckle. “The Masters,” he explained, “have a wonderful sense of humour.” He then gave me my reply. It was an odd moment.

Maitreya has proved remarkably reluctant to reveal himself. In 1988 he reportedly made a fleeting appearance at a prayer meeting in Nairobi. Since then he has preferred to travel incognito. When I contacted Mr Creme this week (by nothing more miraculous than telephone) to inquire about the imminent appearance, he told me that his Master was able to confirm that the star would be appearing shortly, would be seen by everybody throughout the world and that “around a week” after that Maitreya would be making his appearance on American television. Did he know on what programme? “I do. But I’m not allowed to say.”

When I put it to Mr Creme that the timing of the bright star’s appearance seemed to have a particularly seasonal resonance, he replied: “That’s why we’re calling it a Christmas Miracle.”

I’m not sure what to make of all this. But in the interests of balance, I consulted “The Rapture Index” – “The prophetic speedometer of end-time activity” – which is run by a fundamentalist Christian named Todd Strandberg, a former US air force supply sergeant who lives in Nebraska.

While Mr Creme sees the new age of enlightenment arriving relatively painlessly, The Rapture Index takes an apocalyptic view of the future, regularly totting up all the factors necessary for the final, cataclysmic judgment – war, famine, financial meltdown, “Beast Government” and “false Christs” among them. At this moment, true believers will ascend to heaven in “the Rapture”, leaving the rest of us to… well, you really don’t want to know.

The current reading of the Rapture Index is 156 points. This constitutes “Heavy prophetic activity” – not good, but still a few reassuring notches below the threshold of 160, when you are advised to “Fasten your seat belts”.

Figures released last week by the UN Relief and Works Agency reveal that the economic blockade imposed by Israel on Gaza in July last year has had a devastating impact on the local population. Large numbers of Palestinians are unable to afford the high prices of food being smuggled through the Hamas-controlled tunnels to the Strip from Egypt and last week were confronted with the suspension of UN food and cash distribution as a result of the siege.

The figures collected by the UN agency show that 51.8% – an “unprecedentedly high” number of Gaza’s 1.5 million population – are now living below the poverty line. The agency announced last week that it had been forced to stop distributing food rations to the 750,000 people in need and had also suspended cash distributions to 94,000 of the most disadvantaged who were unable to afford the high prices being asked for smuggled food.

“Things have been getting worse and worse,” said Chris Gunness of the agency yesterday. “It is the first time we have been seeing people picking through the rubbish like this looking for things to eat. Things are particularly bad in Gaza City where the population is most dense.

“Because Gaza is now operating as a ‘tunnel economy’ and there is so little coming through via Israeli crossings, it is hitting the most disadvantaged worst.”

Gunness also expressed concern about the state of Gaza’s infrastructure, including its water and sewerage systems, which have not been maintained properly since Israel began blocking shipments of concrete into Gaza, warning of the risk of the spread of communicable diseases both inside and outside of Gaza.

“This is not a humanitarian crisis,” he said. “This is a political crisis of choice with dire humanitarian consequences.”