This was the heading of a piece in the Times today, a sunny but blustery 8th April 2009 (Heavy showers last night but dry all day :-)

And so to the numbers, not sunny, but apocalyptic! The figures for February are the worst on record, simple as that. The worst ever, that it is historic, makes it no less frightening.

Manufacturing output dropped at an annualised rate of nearly 14 percent! 14! Industrial production dropped by 12.5 percent. That is nuts, absolutely terrifying. And the rate of negative growth is even worse in export driven countries like Japan and Germany, as demand has collapsed in the USA in particular.

At the sharp end, in the SME insolvency market in England, it felt like the world fell off a cliff after Christmas. January and February were brutal months for large and small alike.

But the world somehow keeps turning, and now that spring is here maybe things will pick up, hey it’s Easter, it’s a double bank holiday weekend, the hell with it, let’s go shopping!

In the meantime, the “media” is now playing “spot the recovery” – recession fatigue has set in with the wordy classes and the longing for a bounce is palpable.

But the good jobs are not there like they were, and there are more jobs to be cut as we bump along the bottom for a while. So I expect a bit of a blip in the months to come, maybe, only for it all to fizzle out by the end of the summer.

For those of us in business, the Tax man comes calling at the end of July. There is no escape, he wants his share at the worst possible time, and tea and sympathy is not the order of the day, I can assure you, more like petitions to the High Court for an order for Bankruptcy or Winding-up.

I await the insolvency first quarter statistics for 2009 from the department formerly known as the DTi (dfkatdti) (now rebranded cretinously as BERR) with considerable interest(due out first Friday in May). How many companies were forced into voulntary liquidation as a result of the credit crunch? Has the use of administration surged or not, with the introduction of SIP 16 increasing the regulation on pre-pack administrations? Has there been a surge in bankruptcy orders and IVA proposals? I rather expect so.

As for the industrial output figures, it seems impossible that the numbers could get worse. On that basis, it feels like the bottom. For the moment.

The only thing that is certain is that no-one knows anything, and no-one is in charge.