Some days, you wonder why you bother. You bail out the banks, pump liquidity like a fire hose and slash base rates. So the market bombs and even most of the banks are down. Ingrates.

Still, at least HBOS and Royal Bank of Scotland were up. Not by nearly as much as they fell the day before, though. Come to think of it, why was that? Wasn't that why we banned short selling?

Alas for good intentions. It is hard to prove, but even in these strange times the banks might not have fallen so far if shorting had been possible. When the stocks were collapsing on Tuesday, it might have seemed a good time for real-money investors to pick up a few. But in the circumstances, doing so without hedging was suicidal. And hedging had been banned.

Similarly, the more the stocks fell, the more attractive it would have been for fast-money investors who had shorted them to close out their positions at a profit. There were no such positions.

In the curious case of HBOS, the ban had the effect of freezing out the risk arbitrageurs. Some might have thought the Lloyds TSB merger more likely to go through than market prices implied. If so, the trick would have been to go long of HBOS and short of Lloyds TSB, thus exploiting the odds while neutralising the risk of price movements. No such luck.

Message to the Archbishop of York - where are the spivs when you need them?

Debt problems

If you are a UK company relying heavily on short-term debt, the bank rescue offers a ray of hope. Rolling those loans over was never going to be easy. But if the plan works half as well as advertised, it should now at least be feasible.

A month ago both Tesco and Kesa Electricals paid over the odds to renew debt that was not due until a couple of years from now. They did not trust the debt markets to recover by 2010, so were at pains to push repayment further out.

A handy list of relevant companies has been produced by Citi. It works on two main criteria: companies with big specific refinancings due in the next year or two, and those with a lot of short-term debt relative to their market value.

In the first category is Taylor Wimpey, which runs the risk of banks refusing to relax its covenants. Then there are those peddlers of pleasure to the masses, the bookies and the publicans. William Hill faces possible refinancing in 2009 and Ladbrokes in 2010. Wetherspoon has a $140m US private placing to refinance in September 2009 and Punch Taverns has a £295m convertible due late in 2010.

We might have expected those stocks to do well yesterday. They mostly did, in relative terms at any rate. Ladbrokes was up 8 per cent, Punch Taverns 5 per cent, William Hill 4 per cent and Wetherspoon 1 per cent. Granted, Taylor Wimpey was down 2 per cent, but the market was down more than twice that.

In the second category is - for instance - the holiday operator TUI, with gross debt equal to 102 per cent of its market value and 91 per cent of that due within 12 months. TUI was up 4 per cent yesterday.

So, on the face of it, the market is inclined to give the plan some benefit of the doubt. But of course tomorrow, as Scarlett O'Hara remarked, is another day.

Belt tightening

Amid yesterday's rubble, there was a certain gloomy relish in contemplating the market's worst performer. Uniq did not choose the best time to issue a profit warning.

Whereas food manufacturing was once regarded as the ultimate defensive sector on we've-all-got-to-eat grounds, Uniq suggested that we do not - or at least not the luxury Marks and Spencer sandwiches and indulgent desserts it produces.

Many of Uniq's problems are, well, unique to it, and the statement contrasts with an altogether more resilient one from Northern Foods, another M&S supplier, on Tuesday. But its observations on changing consumer trends echo remarks last week from Sir Terry Leahy at Tesco, and yesterday from Justin King at J Sainsbury.

British consumers' belt tightening has reached the point that multi-buy offers will no longer attract, only money-off promotions will do. Whether they are trading down to discounters, or just switching from brands to own-label lines, shoppers are putting pressure on food manufacturers' margins now as surely as rising commodity prices have been doing for the past 18 months.

Even with commodity inflation weakening, the food companies are being squeezed, with those biased towards brands or with heavy borrowings likely to be hardest hit. Already capacity is being cut, and a more severe shake-out seems inevitable.

tony.jackson@ft.com For Lombard, see Page 2